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LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE 


OP 


FRANCIS BACON. 






LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE 

•4 

OF 

FRANCIS BACON, 


VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS, 

LORD CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND. 


“ THE WISEST, BRIGHTEST, MEANEST OF MANKIND.” 


“ The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
Make instruments to scourge us.” 

Lear, Act V., Sc. 3. 

“ Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, 
and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, 
Hie Jacet.” 

Raleigh’s ‘ History of the World,’ p. 776, ed. 1614, fol. 


“ Est boni judicis ampliare justitiam.” 


LONDON: 

SAUNDERS, OTLEY, AND CO., 

66, BROOK STREET, HANOVER SQUARE. 




















• - 






£ Wt>? 









PBEEACE. 


The “ Ancient Mariner,” who so inconsiderately seized 
the wistful wedding guest by the button, and detained 
him in spite of champagne, pretty bonnets, bridesmaids, 
and bon mots, is not more impatiently listened to than an 
author in his preface. Moreover, though an author may, 
by virtue of a staggering gait, and an incoherent manner, 
vindicate his claim to be an “ Ancient Mariner,” he has 
no such interesting story to tell, and is traditionally sup¬ 
posed to be bound to furnish a highly decorous preface 
for a serious historical book. 

In the commencement of the present year, a work 
which professed to furnish a new biography of Lord 
Bacon, from papers never before published, was issued 
from the press. Being abundantly praised in print by 
various critics I was induced to read it. Smart and flip¬ 
pant in style, bold in assertion, with all that fluency 
which practice in a comparatively mechanical art gives, 
and gives most readily, in the absence of every other 



VI 


PREFACE. 


merit; I had scarcely turned a dozen pages before I disco¬ 
vered, that it contained barely one reliable statement, or a 
single fact. That its quotations and reports were garbled. 
That where it professed to give the sense of a speech not 
one feature of the original was preserved, and that it was 
frequently impossible to trace the authority in its new 
aspect. That, in addition, it was full of the most ludi¬ 
crous blunders in history and in law, as well as purely 
romantic as to facts, being, it might be, a life of Cicero, 
but certainly no life of Francis Bacon. Amazed by this 
circumstance, and by the comparatively favourable nature 
of the criticisms and notices it received, I was at a loss, in 
the frequent failure of really admirable works, to account 
for the phenomenon; when I discovered that the book 
was written by the Editor of a literary journal, and that 
its criticisms were, in great part, furnished by his possible 
and actual contributors. 

At this point I am tempted to diverge, for an illustra¬ 
tion which occurs to me. 

Some years since, while visiting a large provincial town, 
I was seized with a violent toothache. I sought a dentist. 
A huge double house at the corner of the market-place, 
which no longer bore aloft that Delphic tripod which 
once mystically signified that teeth were drawn on the 
premises, but in place thereof a resplendent lamp, con¬ 
vinced me that the object of my search resided there. 
But if any doubt lurked in my mind as to the fact, a 
huge brass plate, large enough to represent the ostenta- 



PREFACE. 


vii 

tious expenditure of a charitable institution, satisfied me 
on the point. The door might have represented a civic 
feast. The door-plate formed a grand centre dish, sup¬ 
ported at one end by a brass letter-box, on the other by a 
brass knocker, and flanked on either side by two bell-pulls, 
equally polished, lustrous, and brazen. One of these last 
I pulled, and from the echoes it invoked, and its sonorous 
clang, I felt that it would have graced an enchanted 
castle. A footman with buttons, and a face, of the 
brassiest, opened the door, and deported me into a room 
in which were seated several miserable sufferers, called, 
deridingly, patients, waiting till the great professor >,<w ,at 
liberty. 

It matters not here, the sufferings I endured under his 
hands when my turn came. How he wrenched and tore 
and twisted! I knew little (fortunately for myself) of his 
art, and concluded his violent gymnastic efforts were part 
of the ceremony ; but it is sufficient for me to declare, that 
after an hour’s intense pain, and three days’ continued 
suffering, inquiry of a respectable practitioner convinced 
me that I had been imposed on. That an exorbitant fee 
had been extracted, but that the cause of my suffering 
had not, but in place thereof, two perfectly sound teeth 9 
whose loss I shall have occasion to regret to the day of 
my death. That, in other words, this respectable pro¬ 
fessor was an impostor and a quack, who richly deserved 
the pillory, but who, in place of gaining his deserts, was a 
thriving and successful man. 


Vlll 


PREFACE. 


This story I wish to apply. Observing shortly after a 
magnificent puff of this charlatan in the most influential 
local journal, I called on the Editor, with whom I was 
acquainted. Visions of suffering wretches, defrauded, 
maimed, maltreated, passed before my eyes, and I was 
indignant. To my surprise, on declaring the imposture, 
he received it as a matter of course. “ Of course he 
is an impostor, we all know that; but he is a capital 
advertiser, the other papers support him, he lives in a 
good house, and I can’t afford to differ from them.” But 
consider the wrong to the public, I pleaded, the extortion. 
The answer was simple, “ The public like to be imposed 
on ; they prefer it. He is at least as good an impostor as 
any other. You know the lines, 

* Doubtless the pleasure is as great 
Of being cheated, as to cheat.’ ” 

I was not satisfied, but I departed with this assurance. 
Recently, on an offer to expose a similarly brazen im¬ 
posture in a review, the answer of the Editor was the same. 
“The public prefer being cheated. The book is to some 
extent smart and flippant. They like flippancy; of course 
I dont believe in its statements, or its history, or in fact 
in anything connected with it, but the public like it.” 

This idea of a public, which, resembling the eel, prefers 
to be denuded of much which might be presumed to give 
a charm to existence, has scarcely the advantage of no¬ 
velty. That the proposition is true is really doubtful. 
Whether men like habitually to be deceived, and prefer 


PREFACE. 


IX 


smart works, because they are not true, because honest 
books and facts are dull, is at least an uncertain fact. I 
think the moral of this preface needs no further elucidation. 
I have conscientiously attempted to furnish, from authentic 
facts and documents, a biography of Lord Bacon, in the 
confidence that its accuracy will be no hindrance, perfectly 
prepared to be corrected in my errors, to be castigated 
for my faults, but quite content if a book which is in the 
main most accurate and truthful, secures the recognition 
freely accorded to a work, which could make no pretence 
to be anything of the kind. That it can by no possibility 
be as interesting as a work of fiction I will at once con¬ 
cede ; but hoping that it will, making due allowance for 
the dulness of truth, be considered readable, is of course 
the hope of the public’s obedient servant, 


The Author. 




CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

Preface 

CHAPTER I. 

THE STAGE ON WHICH BACON PLAYED HIS PART. 

Heroes and demigods -------1 

The poetical and heroic aspect of Elizabethan History - 2 

The universality of Shakspere’s and Bacon’s age and genius - 3 

Bacon’s opportune appearance on the stage of history - - 4 

The second birth of civilization—The great struggle for liberty - 5 

Bacon a bad guide, the ruler of the King - 6 

The insidious and dangerous character of his public services - 7 

His attitude as philosopher and statesman - 8 

. The birth of new things, the fading away of an old pageant - 9 

The vices and virtues, the adventure and circumstance, of his 
epoch - -- -- -- - 10 

The careers of prudence and of genius - - - - 11 

Bacon’s early ambition thwarted - - - - - 12 

His flight upward - - - - - - -13 

Pope’s estimate ------- 14 

Lord Campbell and Macaulay’s - - - - 15 

CHAPTER II. 

Hereditary transmission of qualities - - - - 10 

g enealogy - - - - - - - -17 

'V Bacon’s mother, Lady Ann - - - - - 18 

Her family connections - - - - - 19 

s * His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper - 20 

^ His political and judicial life - ----- 21 

His duties in Queen Elizabeth’s first parliament - 22 

^ His speech on the opening of its session - - - - 23 

His eloquence on the loss of Calais — 24 

His official appointments ------ 25 

Queen Elizabeth’s second parliament _ - - - 26 

"Trial of Duke of Norfolk ------ 27 




xii CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Its severity ------- - 28 

o The death of Sir Nicholas Bacon ----- 29 

His character, jests, &c. - - - - - - 30 

Estate at Gorhambury, family, &c. ----- 31 

CHAPTER III. 

JFrancis Bacon’s birthplace ----- 32 

Favourite of the Queen as a boy—Nephew to Cecil Lord 
Burleigh—Pupil of Whitgift ----- 33 

Visits the Continent under Sir Amyas Paulet - - - 34 

Writes notes on the state of Europe — Tour through France 
—Returns to England ------ 35 

CHAPTER IV. 

Bacon’s prospects blighted by his father’s death - - 36 

"Settles as a law student in Gray’s Inn - - - 37 

Advanced by favour to honours ----- 38 

His first begging letter to Lady Burleigh - - - 39 

Mis first begging letter to her Lord, _ 40 

Thanks for Burleigh’s interest with the Queen - - - 41 

Bacon’s early tastes ------ 42 

The dress of law students - - - - - 43 

The regulations of the Inns of Court - 44 

Their masques and fetes - - - - _ - 45 

N Bacon’s appearance and habits - 46 

His appearance in parliament against Maiy Queen of Scots - 47 

His appointment as Clerk of the Council of the Star Chamber 48 
The unsuccessful barrister ------ 49 

His desponding letter to Lord Burleigh - 50 

Its threat of “ sorry book-maker ” - - - - 51 

Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony _ 53 

NHis religious tendencies ------ 54 

His return from Bruges to Paris ----- 55 

Correspondence with Whitgift 50 

Anthony Bacon’s escape from matrimony - 57 

His mother’s anger at his stay abroad - - - 58 

His messenger to propitiate her ----- 59 

Sir Francis Drake’s return - - - - - 1 - 60 

Anthony returns to England - - - - - 61 

Robert Devereux second Earl of Essex - - - - 62 

His patronage of Bacon ------ 03 

The Cecils bad paymasters ------ 64 

Their alliance forsaken by the Bacons - 65 

The bond between Bacon and Essex ----- 66 


CONTENTS. xiii 

CHAPTER Y. 

PAGE 

Robert Devereux’s birth and parentage - 67 

His rise as the favourite of royalty ----- 68 

Anthony Bacon’s political connection with the Catholics - 69 

Parsons’ libel (?) on the Cecils—Bacon’s answer to it - - 70 

The contrast of its testimony of Cecil, with a posthumous 
portrait by the same author - - - - 71 

Raleigh’s expedition ------ 72 

Bacon in debt and danger ------ 73 

Proposes reform of the law in parliament—His speech - 74 

Persecution of the Catholics ------ 75 

Mr. Oliver St. John’s speech - - - - - 76 

The Queen interferes to stop the debate - - - 77 

Francis Bacon’s public opposition to the Cecils and the Court 78 
Its offence to Majesty -------79 

His apology to Burleigh and recantation - 80 

The Recorder of Chelmsford’s bold apology for a similar offence 82 
Reasons for Bacon’s contumacy ----- 83 

Fast and loose with his kinsmen ----- 84 

The Essex tie of affinity ------ 85 

The first quarrel with Coke ------ 86 

The respective claims of these great rivals to the honour of 
posterity - -- -- -- - 87 

Coke, the greatest and most enlightened lawyer of his age - 88 

Lady Bacon’s dislike to Catholics - - - - 89 

More “ a father than a friend to him ” in Anthony’s words - 91 

Francis Bacon a candidate for the Solicitorship - - 92 

Francis Bacon writes to the Queen - - - - 93 

Her Majesty’s opinion of his merits - 94 

Essex’s intercession - -- -- --95 

The manner that Bacon has been advanced - 96 

Bacon traduces his rival ------ 97 

Injudicious and incapable advocacy, and its results - - 98 

CHAPTER VI. 

Controversial, and dedicated to the disinterested admirers of 
Mr. Eepioorth Dixon. 

The desire of Job that his adversary would write a book, as 

expressed by the moderns ----- 99 

Reasons for a great critic’s life of Bacon - - - - 100 

The superiority of the author of * A Personal History,’ &c., over 
Lord Macaulay - - - - - - -100 

The ‘ Lives of the Chancellors ’ - - - - - 101 


XIV 


CONTENTS. 


• PACK 

The aptitude of a great reviewer in creating facts - - 102 

The Collier forgeries and the ‘ Athenaeum ’ - - - 103 

The scope and opportunity of creative genius - - - 104 

Generous and noble advocacy - - - - - 105 

The difficulties besetting it - - - - - 106 

The facts inconveniently opposed - - - - - 107 

Character of the hero impossible - - - - - 108 

Its consistency with facts, and inconsistency with new history - 109 

The causes which led to its infirmities - - - - HO 

Nature “ all in all ”—Man without claim on it - - - 111 

A new and original inquirer prepared to turn the world inside 

out—New lamps for old ones—An unprofitable exchange - 112 

The new history of Peacham’s case - - - - - 113 

Of the Essex plot ------ - 114 

Of Coke’s acts and life - - - - - -115 

Macaulay transcended as a creator of history - - - 116 

The glorious fame of Lord Coke - - - - -117 

Mr. Dixon’s conscientious abnegation of self - - - 119 

His willingness to go great lengths—His critical admirers’ injustice 119 

CHAPTER VII. 

Praise of Mr. Hepworth Dixon continued. 

Probable grief of disinterested friends at insufficient praise - 120 

Some of the foundations of new history - - - - 121 

Their imaginative enlargement - - - - _ 122 

Specimens after Dumas - - - - _ -123 

Posthumous portraiture of a truthful kind - - - 124 

Ornate rhetoric - - - - - _ _ -125 

Sir Christopher Blount and Lady Leicester - - - 126 

Their characters sketched by a generous hand - - - 127 

Humble imitation of the style - - - - _ i 28 

The case of “ Benevolences ” - 129 

The Editor of the ‘ Athenaeum ’ as an instructor of Lord Campbell 
in law - - - - - - - _ -130 

The late Chancellor’s ignorance ----- 131 

His censor’s wisdom, and his truth, as shown in the narration of 

facts - 132 

Coke’s claims on posterity—His lofty and noble integrity - 133 

His sustained conflict with tyranny - - _ _ 134 

The severe judgment of Macaulay transcended by that of a 
more distinguished authority - - - _ -135 

The charm of the new character - - - _ _ 133 

Mr. Lingard’s candour impeached - - _ _ -137 

The value of the impeachment - - - _ _ 133 

Its consistency - - - - _ _ _ -139 



CONTENTS. XV 

Wholesale slander of Lettice Knollys - 449 

Lady Compton 444 

Dudley’s character 442 

The scandal of Elizabeth’s day - 443 

Its cause and origin ______ 444 

Pope’s wicked malignancy - - _ _ _ -145 

A modern critic’s superiority in moderation, temper, and purity, 
with a commentary thereupon - - - _ _ 443 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Life of Francis Bacon continued. 

^ His position in the years 1593 and 1594 - 147 

The two brothers’ connection with politics - - - 148 

Their mother’s anger thereat - - - _ - 149 

Camden’s ‘ Hibernia ’ - - - _ _ _ 459 

Tom Churchyard’s verse - - - - - -151 

The Queen displeased with Essex’s advocacy - 152 

Bac<m’s first brief - - - - - - -153 

Sir Robert Cecil - - - - - - _ 454 

Court gossip -------- 455 

Mr. Bacon pleads in court - - - - - _ 455 

The Lord Treasurer Burleigh, Sliakspere’s Polonius* - - 157 

Sir Robert the hunchback - - - - - 158 

Essex’s influence at Court - - - - - -159 

His intercession continued on behalf of Bacon - - - 160 

Bacon’s comparative failure at thirty-three — The traditional 
barrister like the medlar, “ rotten before he is ripe ” - - 161 

No lawyer—“ In law not deep ” ----- 162 

Anthony’s derelictions from duty - - “ - - 163 

The prospect of place brightens - - - - - 164 

No means spared ------- 165 

Lady Ann's intercession with her nephew - 166 

The Queen undecided - - - - - - -167 

Bacon suspects Robert Cecil - - - - - 168 

Fleming appointed Solicitor-General - - - - 169 

Bacon offends the Lord Keeper Sir Thomas Egerton - 170 

His indebtedness _______ 474 

His proposal to benefit the public for his own advancement - 173 

His continued failure in place-hunting - 175 

The causes—The Queen’s prejudices—His own selfishness - 176 

* From the circumstance that Polonius’ advice to his son is copied from and improved 
upon Burleigh’s advice to Robert Cecil, it has been assumed that Burleigh and Polonius 
were the same, though there is, I believe, no other foundation for the belief. 


XY1 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER IX. 


The entertainment at Essex House—Bacon writes speeches for 
the masque - 

Anthony takes up his abode with the Earl - 
Essex’s gift of land at Twickenham to the value of fifteen or 
twenty thousand pounds to Francis Bacon 
Essex’s departure for the Azores - 
Robert Devereux’s letter from Plymouth - 
Bacon’s letter in reply 

Another letter from Essex before setting out 

He intercedes for Bacon, with the Lord Keeper Lord Buckliurst, 


177 

178 

179 
181 
182 

183 

184 


and Sir John Fortescue - - 185,186 


CHAPTER X. 


The descent upon Cadiz ------ 187 

The attack and victory - - - - - - 188 

The quarrel of Essex and Raleigh - - - - - 189 

Robert Cecil made Secretary of State - 190 

Lady Ann Bacon’s acerbity of temper - - - 191 

Mr. Francis Bacon’s speech in parliament “ On Inclosures ” - 192 

Retraces his steps to gain court favour - - - 193 

Regains the Queen’s approval - - - - - 194 

Writes advice to Essex, whose favour is waning at Court - - 195 

Its value and pregnancy ° - - - - - 198 

Bacon and Coke rivals in love, or for the same lady's hand - 199 

Bacon pursues his suit by letters of recommendation - - 200 

Arrested for debt ------- 201 

VDisappointed on all hands, of a wife, a place, and practice - 202 

CHAPTER XI. 

The decline in favour of Robert Devereux ----- 203 

His fatal insurrection ------ 204 

His house in the Strand - - 205 

His co-conspirators ------- 207 

His tongue his enemy - ------ 208 

The Queen’s enmity ------ 209 

The gathering at Essex House ----- 210 

Ambassadors from the Court - - - - _ 211 

Essex’s complaint, and appeal for justice - 212 

The interview of the judges with the conspirators - - 213 

Their confinement in the house ----- 214 

Essex marches on the City - - - _ - 216 

The attack - -- -- -- - 217 

The hand-to-hand fight - - - _ _ _ 218 




CONTENTS. Xvii 

PAGE 

The blockade of Essex House - 219 

The Countess of Essex ------ 220 

The surrender ------- - 221 

Close of the plot ------- 222 

CHAPTER XII. 

The Trial of Essex in Westminster Hall - 223 

The character of the scene _____ 224 

Walter Devereux’s bequest to Elizabeth - 225 

The arena of justice ------ 226 

The fading away of feudalism ->---- 227 

Raleigh, Camden, Ben Jonson, Shakspere — 228 

The possible audience, history being silent - - - - 229 

The Argonauts ------- 230 

The splendour of the age - - - - - -231 

The growing strength and grandeur of the empire of England 232 

The great men—Shakspere, Bacon, Coke - - - - 233 

The * Institutes ;’ * Instauratio Magna‘ Hamlet ’ - - 234 

Raleigh’s malignity {vide also Appendix, p. 552) - - 235 

The assemblage of the Court ----- 236 

The peers and judges ------- 237 

Their character, titles, and exploits - 238 

Cumberland, Somerset, Earl of Worcester - - - - 239 

Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury ; Clinton, Earl of Lincoln ; 

Stanley, of Derby, &c. ------ 240 

Robert Devereux’s behaviour ------ 241 

The prisoners Essex and Southampton plead “ Not guilty” - 243 

Sir Edward Coke’s speech 244 

Sir Francis Bacon’s oratory _____ 248 

Essex’s foolish accusation of Cecil ----- 249 

Robert Cecil’s counter attack _____ 251 

Its bitter animosity - - - - - - - 252 

Bacon’s further pleading against his friend and patron - 255 

Waiting for the verdict ------ 257 

The fall from high estate ------ 258 

The wife and mother of the prisoner - 261 

The verdict “ Guilty ”------ 262 

The prisoner’s defence ------ 263 

His message to the Queen after sentence - 264 

The closing of the court ------ 265 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Anthony Bacon’s character ------ 266 

His anonymous letter to the Countess of Northumberland - 267 

The two brothers ------- 268 


xvm 


CONTENTS. 


The influence of Robert Cecil on Essex’s fall - 
On his journey into Ireland as Lord Deputy - 
The Cecil dinner to his enemies - 

His first imprisonment ------ 

Bacons letter excusing liis first treason and duplicity - 

The alternations of royal favour and anger - 

The Bacons’ obligations to their patron - 

Essex’s ill health ------- 

Essex writes to the Queen ------ 

Sir John Harrington’s testimony of the royal anger - 

The Earl’s secretary Cuffe ------ 

The plot simply the result of Essex’s disaffection and despair 
Further proofs of Mr. Dixon’s great creative faculty and general 
accuracy -------- 


CHAPTER XIV. 

The value of Bacon’s private life in estimating his character 
His pamphlet on Essex’s death - - - - - 

Its false testimony ------- 

The subsequent recantation - 

The decline of the Queen's health - 

Her extraordinary grief at Essex’s death - 

Her last parliament—Bacon Member for Ipswich 

A follower of the Court ------ 

The debate on Monopolies - - - - 

Bacon on Royal Prerogative - - - - - 

Mr. Martin’s complaint of the sufferings of the nation 
Monopolies revoked ------ 

Their rise and origin ------- 


CHAPTER XV. 

The accession of James I. - 

Bacon's letters to people at Court—To Foulis, a favourite of the 
King's; to Mr. Davis; Mr. Robert Kempe; the Earl of North¬ 
umberland, and the Earl of Southampton - 300, 

Letter to the Lfing - - 

Fixes his eye on a lady with a fortune - 
His probable motive for matrimony - 
Career in James’s first parliament - 
The publication of ‘ The Advancement of Learning ’ in 1605 
Coke’s triumph up to this point—His law, and love of liberty - 
His second slight of Bacon - 

Bacon made Solicitor-General June 25,1607—Publishes ‘ Wisdom 
of the Ancients ’—Reversion of the Star Chamber—Registrar- 
ship falls in, and speeches in parliament—Made joint judge of 
the Knight Marshal’s Court, 1611 - 


PAGE 

269 

270 

271 

272 

273 

274 

276 

277 

278 

279 

280 
281 

282 


285 

287 

288 

289 

290 

291 

292 

293 

294 

295 

296 

297 

298 


299 


301 

303 

305 

306 

308 

309 

310 
312 


313 





CONTENTS. 


X]X 


PAGE 

The death of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury - 314 

Bacon's letters to the King on his cousin's death - - 315 

Their calumny and ingratitude - 316 

The Solicitor-General grows in favour - - - - 317 

Tries for the Attorneyship ------ 318 

Makes a bold stroke for the place - 319 

Helps the King to overawe the judges - 320 

Intimacy with James - - - - - - 321 

Words to conceal thoughts ------ 322 

James’s notions of kingly prerogative - 323 

Bacon his pliant servant ______ 324 

Modern law of king and subject - 325 

CHAPTER XYI. 

The growing strength of parliaments - 326 

James’s power, as bequeathed by the Tudors, all but absolute 327 
James’s disposition to enlarge his power - 328 

Sir Francis Bacon’s entire compliance with his views - 329 

The law of England on the subject ----- 330 

Bacon’s infraction of the law - - - - - 331 

The Commons affrighted at the King’s claims - 332 

James’ and Bacon's testimony that the King’s voice was the voice 
of God - - - - - - - - 333 

The Commons declare their privileges - 334 

The King’s ignorance of the peril of his course - — 335 

CHAPTER XVII. 

The prosecution of Beacham _____ 336 

Difficulties in its way ------ 337 

Mr. Dixon’s ‘ New History ’ of the subject - 338 

Peacham innocent - - - . - - 339 

James’s personal vindictiveness ----- 341 

Peacham subjected to the rack ----- 342 

Bacon's infamous letter on the subject to the King - - - 343 

Writes to the Bishop of Bath and Wells to procure evidence 344 

Proceeds to tamper with the judges - - - - 345 

Attempts to coerce them into a false judgment - 346 

His attempt to influence Coke ----- 347 

The arguments employed - - - - - - 348 

The result, a failure ______ 349 

CHAPTER XVni. 

Owen’s case - -- -- -- - 350 

Another example of Mr. Dixon’s accuracy—His honourable 
evidence as to character ----- 351 


XX 


CONTENTS. 


The nature of Peacham’s offence - 

The public getting wind - 

Peacham’s death (vide also Appendix, p. 557) 

Comments on his trial ------ 

Another proof that Mr. Dixon is wiser and more learned than 
Macaulay (by himself) ------ 

The English law of Torture (and Appendix, p. 557) - 
The mutilation of the Stuart dynasty _ 

The peculiar iniquities of Torture - 


PAGE 

352 

353 

354 

355 

357 

358 

359 

360 


CHAPTER XIX. 


James I.’s extravagance and poverty - 361 

Illegal taxation ------- 362 

The fiction of ‘ Benevolences 363 

Oliver St. John’s opposition to these exactions - - 364 

His letter to the Mayor of Marlborough - 365 

His letter when in prison to the King - 366 

Bacon’s business aptitude and energy - 367 

Depreciation of his rivals ------ 368 

The quarrel as to the jurisdiction of Chancery - - 369 

Evil advice to the King ----- - 370 

The trial of Oliver St. John ------ 371 

Bacon’s speech - - - - - - - 372 

Trials of the Overbury murderers - 374 

The fall of Somerset - - - - - - 375 

The King’s prerogative - - - - - -376 

Bacon rides on the crest of the wave - - - - 378 

Prosecutor in causes of duelling ----- 379 

The crime of duelling ------ 380 

v The people’s estimate of Bacon - 381 

His want of sympathy with their woes - - - - 382 

His notions of honour and fame _____ 383 

As exemplified in his Essays - - - - - 384 

Contrasted with Shakspere - - - - - -385 

His notions of heroism , - - - - - - 386 

His triumph over his rival Coke - - _ _ _ 387 

Sir Edward disgraced through Bacon - 388 

Weldon on James' and Somerset’s guilt - 390 

The case of “ Commendams ”----_ 391 

The King’s interference 392 

The judges summoned to Whitehall - 393 

Their interview with offended majesty _ _ _ _ 394 

Sir Francis Bacon answers Coke - 395 


When the case occurs, to decide ’twixt the King and justice, 
Coke will do his duty ------ 


396 


CONTENTS. 


XXI 


PAGE 


Coke sequestered from the Privy Council — 397 

Policy and malignity for once unite - 39S 

Another Chief Justice nominated ----- 399 

The ex-Chief Justice’s “ turbulent courage ” - - - 400 

Coke’s public repute ------- 401 

Lord Bacon's letter to his rival after his disgrace - - 402 

Makes out Coke’s supersedeas _____ 405 

The dream of ambition ------ 406 


CHAPTER XX. 


The grants of Monopolies to the King’s favourites - - 407 

Villiers’ and Bacon’s mutual services _ 408 

Ellesmere’s resignation of the Great Seal - - - - 409 

Francis Bacon made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, March 7, 

1617, n. s.—His gratitude to Villiers - - - - 410 

The terms of his tenure ------ 411 

The lackey of Villiers - - - - - - 412 

Fortune overripe ------- 413 

The seeds of danger - - - - - - 414 

The abduction of Coke’s daughter ----- 415 

The rescue 416 

Sir Edward applies to the Privy Council for a warrant of search 416 
Lord Campbell’s narrative of its use - - - - 417 

Its probable inaccuracy—The narrative of a contemporary - 418 

Court gossip thereupon ______ 419 

First complaints against Bacon as judge - 420 

Bacon opposes the match proposed between Frances Coke and 
Sir John Villiers ______ 421 

His arguments against it _____ 422 

Defers to the King ______ 423 

But attempts to injure Buckingham - 424 

Another Parliament proposed - - - - - 425 

Correspondence concerning the projected marriage - - 426 

The King angry at Bacon’s opposition - _ - - 427 

Bacon tries a shaft at Buckingham ----- 428 

The King’s resentment ------ 429 

Bacon’s apology _______ 430 

Contents of his letter to the King ----- 431 

Bacon out of favour ------- 432 

The King’s reprimand ------ 433 

Buckingham’s rebuke ______ 435 

Yelverton’s mission to make peace—Weldon’s account of Bacon’s 
abject apology ------- 437 

His circumstantial narrative of the humiliation _ - - 439 

Villiers made wise by Bacon’s ingratitude to Essex and Somerset 443 


xxii CONTENTS. 

The reconciliation - 
Bacon received into favour - 
Again in the path to fortune 
Villiers’ direction of affairs in Chancery 
Monpesson and Mitchel the monopolists 
Bacon’s complicity in their frauds - 
Execution and death of Raleigh 
Villiers’ and Bacon’s correspondence 
The favourite’s jurisdiction in Chancery 
Accumulating disorders - 

Increase of iniquities - 


CHAPTER XXI. 

Petitions against Bacon’s administration of justice 
The projected torture of Peacock - 
The production of ‘ The Novum Organum,’ 1620- 
Baron St. Albans January, 1621 - 
The flight of Monpesson ----- 
Villiers’ supremacy in the State - 
The downfall of the conspirators - 
The debate in Parliament on their acts - 
The “ referees ” 

Buckingham abandons his minion - - - - 

The coming flood ------ 

Bacon in present purgatory - - - - - 

A parliamentary device _ 

Prepares to die ------ 

Adjournment of the House - 

The “ muster ” of petitions - - - - - 

The “ thousand petitioners ” to Parliament 
Counterfeit illness ------ 

The apothecaries’ and grocers’ case - 
Bacon's letter to Sir Humphrey May - 

He pleads guilty to the charge of bribery 
Attempts to conciliate his judges - 
The confession a mere resource of policy 
List of the cases of bribery proved - 
Lady Wharton’s case—Its iniquity - 
The Numidians that Sallust outraged - 
Bishop of Llandaff’s complicity - - 

Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s manufacture of history 
Villiers overreached by his servant - 
But maintains his private friendship - 
St. Albans fined 40.000Z.—His verdict - 


PAGE 

444 

- 445 
447 

- 449 
450 

- 452 
454 

- 455 
457 

458, 459, 460 
- 461, 462 


- 463 
464 

-Made 

- 466 
467 

- 468 
469 

- 470 
472 

- 475 
476 

- 477 
478 

- 479 
480 

- 481 
482 

- 483 
.484 

- 485 
486 

- 487 
488 

- 489 
490 

- 491 
492 

- 493 
494 

- 495 
496 




CONTENTS. xxiii 

CHAPTER XXII. 

PAGE 

No golden rule of mediocrity in crime - 497 

The parallel with Richard HI. ----- 498 

Craves mercy of the King ------ 499 

The bribery of a judge more criminal than that of a layman - 500 

Historic justification of bribery _____ 501 

Retires to Gorhamburv ------ 502 

Translation of ‘ The Advancement of Learning ’ into Latin - 503 

Begging letters ------- 504 

James’s inclination to the civil law ----- 505 

The preference for Roman law ----- 506 

The Lord Keeper Williams, Bacon’s successor in Chancery - 506 

The source and cause of Bacon’s success and fall the same in 
origin - - - - - - - 507 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

The moral from Raleigh’s ‘ History of the World ’ - - 508 

Bacon greater than Napoleon after his fall—The philosopher 509 
The result of ambition - - - - - -510 

Its penalties - - - - - - - 511 

The position of man in nature _____ 5 x 2 

The alternations of light and shade in Elizabeth’s age - 513 

The growth of modern civilization ----- 514 

„ of English commerce - - - - 515 

Elizabeth a great monarch ------ 516 

The hand of Rome on England ----- 517 

The fulfilment of the mission - - - - 518 

The luminaries of the age - - - - - ‘519 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

The great triumvirate, Bacon, Coke, Shakspere - 520 

Their utility in history - - - - - - 521 

The philosopy of nature ------ 522 

‘ The Novum Organum ’ and ‘ Advancement of Learning ’ sealed 
books - -- -- -- - 523 

The advent of literature and civilization in Florence - - 524 

Roger Ascham 525 

His advice to majesty ------- 526 

His influence on his age ------ 527 

Hi s testimony against popery _____ 528 

Luther’s influence on learning—Bacon’s testimony - - 529 

Milton, Inigo Jones, Bacon, infected by classicism - - 530 

Shakspere exempt ------ 531 

The system of philosophy evolved by the age - 532 


XXIV 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER XXV. 

PAGE 

Poetry the first art to awake - 533 

Its action and reaction on the time - - * - - - 534 

Popular belief in witchcraft and poison - 535 

The plague -------- 536 

The wizard, or necromancer - 537 

The discovery of America - - - - - - 538 

The ventures of Essex, Cumberland, and Howard - - 539 

Classical influence on literature ----- 540 

The poetry of chivalry - - - - - - 541 

The growth of Puritanism ------ 542 

Macaulay on the growth of poetry - 543 

The translation of the Bible ------ 544 

The influence of Catholicism ----- 545 

The heroes and knights of chivalry ----- 546 

Minerva the tutelary deity of wisdom as well as of poetry, and its 
type - -- -- -- - 547 

Bacon’s majestic intellect 548 

“ Wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind ” - - - 549 


APPENDIX. 

Warrant for torture in Norfolk’s trial - 551 

Raleigh’s letter to Robert Cecil urging on Essex's execution — 552 

Extracts from the Parallel drawn by Sir Henry Wotton between 
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and George Yilliers, Duke of 
Buckingham ------- - 554 

Extracts, presumed to be in Bacon’s hand, from his Pamphlet on 

Raleigh’s death 555 

Note on Torture 557 

Note on the Story of the Ring ----- 550 










THE LIFE OF LORD BACON. 


CHARTER I. 

In the history of every nation, and probably in the history 
of every unit of that nation, there is a kind of border¬ 
land between the world of fancy and of fiction, and the 
world of fact and reality. We look hack to our child¬ 
hood, when our impressions of the beauty of material 
things wore an exaggerated and splendid aspect, contrary, 
as we know now, to their reality, and which was, in fact, 
what Lord Bacon has himself called “ an accommoda¬ 
tion o'f the shows of things to the desires of the mind.” 
Similar to this, hut springing from a widely dissimilar 
cause, in the history of every people there is a debatable 
ground of fable, wherein heroes walked the earth in the 
guise of men; when men born of the gods, having con¬ 
verse with the powers of air, men of immortal origin and 
immortal deeds, fought and lived and suffered, as an 
example to their fellow-men. We are familiar to-day as 
if they were our own, with the Heroes which the most 
imaginative and most highly-gifted race of antiquity 
assigned to this period in their historic life;—with 
Hercules, the mighty worker, self-sacrificing, loving 
labour, mightily endowed, valiant beyond measure, full 
of griefs for miseries he could not alleviate, as he appeared 




2 


THE DEMIGODS OF ANTIQUE HISTORY. 


in the ideal of Lysippus, and then a prey to sloth and 
effeminacy;—with Ulysses, the image of restless adven¬ 
ture ;—with Nestor, wise in counsel, cautious, and sage. 
These were real men to the Athenians. The ‘ Iliad ’ was, 
as we know, received as history, referred to in debates 
between rival states, and was in all respects honoured as 
if its heroes were gods, whose splendid achievements were 
not merely ever worthy of veneration, but ever to be the 
standards of emulation and of active example. 

That a similar reverence for a remote history existed in 
the Roman, the Jewish, the Egyptian, the Scandinavian 
mind is certain. Probably the feeling, in origin as in 
utility, has been universal. The Englishman of to-day, 
however, has no such past to look back upon. The saints 
in his mythology are too mythical to interest him. But 
he can turn with reverence to a period scarcely three hun¬ 
dred years removed, when his nation as a Christian nation 
first came into existence;—when the sun of chivalry 
and fable and romance set for ever;—when a faith that 
was a sentiment departed, and a religion that was hence¬ 
forth to be based on reason, that was to satisfy the loftiest 
wisdom no less than the most implicit reverence, was to 
be inaugurated when the men, like Jason and Theseus, 
were to be men of immortal deeds—men who were to 
combine within themselves the attributes of the preceding 
and of succeeding ages, the chivalry, adventure, and 
daring of a feudal period with a wisdom, a public spirit, 
patriotism, and accomplishment that serve for example 
for many ages coming after. The genius and attributes 
of the men born between the year 1550 and the year 
1600, compared with that of the leading minds of any 




THE GOLDEN AGE. 


3 


successive period, are in wide contrast. Who would com¬ 
pare the best men of the days of Waller, of Pope, of 
Johnson, or of Byron, with the Elizabethan men? The 
Standard of no subsequent period has been of the same lofty 
and universal character. Somers and Mansfield were great 
lawyers, nobly gifted in every sense, but they could in no 
respect compare with Coke. Newton’s philosophy was even 
less calculated than Bacon’s for universal guidance and 
acceptance, being rather in application than creation; and 
surely no poetry can be classed with that of Shakspere. 

In a period like this, a competitor with men nobly 
gifted as himself, Francis Bacon was born—in an age, 
in which not merely the acts, but the actors seem heroic, 
all but fabulous. The son of a Lord Chancellor, or, 
to speak with more accuracy, a Lord Keeper, the highest 
law officer under the crown, entitled, by virtue of his noble 
office, to take precedence next to the blood royal. A 
recent and gifted historian has said that no great states¬ 
man is born of a nation of fools—no great general of 
a nation of cowards; asserting, in fact, that man is a 
component part of his age: and his proposition can 
scarcely be questioned as a general truth, though liable 
to peculiar exceptions. Francis Bacon is but an instance 
of its accuracy. He was the contemporary of Shakspere, 
Raleigh, Burleigh, Walsingham, Winwood, Wotton, Ben 
Jonson, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Michael Drayton, 
Hooker, Fuller, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, 
Essex, Southampton, Overbury, Northampton, Camden, 
Coke, Drake, Frobisher, Howard of Effingham—all men 
eminent in their intellectual gifts, and qualified by their 
elevated attainments to grace any station in the world’s 

b 2 


4 


THE SECOND BIRTH OF CIVILIZATION. 


history. Yet he was “as Hesperus among these lesser 
lights.” Of all its Heroes as scholar and philosopher the 
wisest. His life has thus interests to us neither limited 
nor confined to its merely personal history. 

He has a tie nearer and dearer to us as Englishmen. 
He rose the brightest intellectual light of his age to grace 
the dawn of learning—not merely a man endowed with 
the richest philosophic genius of his time, but of that 
first rank of that first order of Creative minds, w’hose 
proud and pre-eminent distinction it is, to frame laws 
for the universe, to become the founders of empires in 
the realms of thought (if the image may be allowed), 
the legislators of a philosophy as likely to be eternal as 
the language in which it is enshrined ; his mind so far 
representative, that one of the proudest distinctions of his 
race is to be honoured through him. 

Bacon appeared in a culminating period, as it seems 
now, even of Universal History. In a confluence of time. 
In an epoch nationally of more splendid intellectual ac¬ 
tivity, more enterprising, more chivalrous, more adorned 
and graced by poetry and wit, as profound in scholarship, 
as deep and earnest in its sympathies, as distinguished 
for the acuteness of its theologic acumen, as original in its 
grasp, as any in the world’s history. It may be doubted 
whether the ages of richest intellectual endowment, Athe¬ 
nian, Roman, or Florentine, equalled in power, originality, 
or mental resource the fifty years between 1560 and 
1611. But of all the great men that adorned that age, 
that made it so illustrious, he was, saving one, the 
greatest. This is one reason why his personal history, 
his life and character, are important. But there are other 



THE GREAT STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY. 


D 


motives to guide us to its consideration. He was a 
leading Statesman in the most stirring and eventful period 
in English history. I say advisedly the most stirring, 
because in the fifteen years which saw Bacon floating 
with wind and tide, under the summer’s sun of Kingly 
favour, to power and prosperity, England fell from 
loyalty far down to revolution ; because within that time 
every right of Kingly Prerogative which led to the breach 
between Charles I. and his parliament was advanced and 
contested; and because it was a period of Crisis between 
the absolute power of a Monarch, on the one hand, and 
the absolute rights of a People on the other. 

It is usually as difficult to trace the encroachments of 
the tide on an ancient land-mark as to define absolutely a 
precise period of change in history. Yet the life of James I. 
enables us to do so. He found a loyal people, and he 
left them discontented ; he found them the willing subjects, 
in fact, of an all but arbitrary dominion, he left them con¬ 
testing the right to question every act of kingly preroga¬ 
tive. Resolutely bent on asserting every legal right of 
their great inheritance, so long held in abeyance. Every 
constitutional privilege which we now possess was, by force 
of oppression, asserted in his reign. Every feudal right, 
which centuries of prescription had consolidated, was in 
turn to be disputed by his parliament. Every abuse, 
which the most despotic monarchs since William the 
Norman had attempted, was in turn to be tried by James. 
He was determined to rule with more than imperial 
power. He would become the founder of a new state, 
of a more absolute monarchy. The decrees of preroga¬ 
tive, that so long had slept, he would wake. They had 


6 


ILLEGAL POWERS. 


fallen into disuse, had become like forfeits in a barber’s 
shop, as well in mock as mark. Henceforth they shall 
be living Statutes, a terror to all offenders. 

The power of granting arbitrary patents or monopo¬ 
lies to favourites, of pardoning criminals justly condemned • 
for crimes against the state, to burn heretics, by an arbi¬ 
trary writ, for nonconformity in religion, to issue procla¬ 
mations which should have the force of law, to tax without 
consent of parliament, to imprison without fair trial, to 
apply the torture of the rack where evidence of guilt ] 
failed, to reverse acts of parliament by a “ Non Obstante,”* 
and to apply this power of “ Non Obstante ” to civil as well 
as criminal cases, to demand money, in form of a loan j 
or free gift as “ A Benevolence,” and to exercise an 
unconstitutional and inquisitorial jurisdiction without the 
proper formalities of evidence, on information “ Ore tenus,” 
and without any of the elements of a fair trial, were only 
some among the several powers and privileges claimed by 
James I. as King. In all these claims Bacon was James’s 
legal adviser. He was the King’s putter on. James’s j 
prerogative never soared so high, never swooped so low, 
as during Bacon’s Attorneyship and Chancellorship. The 
worst period in James’s life is that in which Bacon ruled. 

If James attempted pernicious and scandalous infringe¬ 
ments of law, Bacon was there to advise, to justify, to 
enforce them. If to the King’s name belong the lasting 
disgrace of torturing the innocent, of breaking the 

* Simply and in non-legal phraseology, this phrase implied a prero- ; 
gative appertaining to the crown, which gave the King the power of j 
frustrating at will all verdicts in the law courts, or of nullifying any 
act of parliament that was contrary to his will and pleasure ; thus it J 
might stand as the symbol of arbitrary power. 



A DANGEROUS FOE TO FREEDOM. 


7 


law, of violating the rights of his people, to Bacon 
belongs the dishonour of inciting him. If the King’s 
public acts were infamous, his reign profligate, his court 
debased and servile, to Bacon attaches the shame of 
being adviser in chief in the most infamous of those 
acts, of being, if not the most profligate, the most ser¬ 
vile of his public servants. Of all James’s reign, the 
six years inclusive from 1614 to 1620 were the worst. 
This is precisely Bacon’s reign of power. To Bacon 
belongs the pre-eminent distinction of being the boldest 
adviser of the most audacious attempts ever directed 
against the liberties of Englishmen. Jeffries and Scroggs 
dared nothing so fatal. Their labours were open; Francis 
Bacon’s were secret and insidious. Theirs were brutal, 
and bore condemnation on their face. His were graced 
by every resource of oratory, adorned by every charm 
which a courtier-like manner, a Machiavellian art, could 
insidiously wind about them. 

There is an additional aspect of historic interest in 
Bacon’s life to us. He is witness against himself. In 
his letters we shall read how he advised the King to use 
torture where evidence of crime failed, in other words, 
against innocent men. How, in zeal for his own advance¬ 
ment in honour—what a mockery the word seems!—he 
stood by and superintended the racking of an old grey¬ 
headed man, nearly seventy years of age—a clergyman, 
sacred by his holy office, by his grey hairs, and that not 
merely in defiance of the law of the realm clearly esta¬ 
blished, but with this terrible aggravation, that the victim 
was an innocent man. We shall see how he advised the 
King to “ Star-Chamber ” the judges, in other words, to fine 


8 BACON IN THE EYE OF HISTORY. 

or imprison them, and dismiss them from their office, if 
they gave decisions contrary to the King s command. We 
shall see how he urged “arbitrary taxation ” on the 
King. How he sold justice for a mess of pottage. How 
he sat in judgment on men, and condemned them for 
just accusations against himself, thus building crime on 
crime. How (as Mr. Hargrave has drawn the distinc- ” 
tion) he sold not merely justice but injustice; how he 
lied, and crouched, and fawned, and flattered, to enrich 
himself and to enslave his country. 

Bacon stands aloft, proudly pre-eminent in his great ? 
gifts in philosophy. He is not a whit inferior intellec- ! 
tually as a statesman. Since the days of Nicholas Ma- 
chiavelli, no more astute politician has lived. In tact, 
in craft, in subtlety, in subdolous and insidious practices 
he was never surpassed. He stands grandly, in the eye 
of history, between the King and his subjects; between 
a Monarch determined to stretch his power to the utter¬ 
most and a people bound to maintain their rights— 
between a Ruler resolute to advance new privileges and 
enforce old ojies, and a people compelled by necessity 
to deny both. His life is to this extent history ; and 
although it unhappily offers no vistas of lettered ease, 
of happy friendships, of consecrated ties of union and love, 
of that delightful interchange of wit with affection, of 
learning with elegance, of the graces of strength with 
love, which has thrown a charm round the lives of many 
gifted men, it still invites us to its contemplation. It 
gives glimpses of the struggle for freedom of our ancestors, 
not the fight open and on the field of battle, but of the 
more fatal and deadly war of power, against law and 





HIS EPOCH. 


0 


justice. It opens lights to the stirring epoch of the 
busiest and grandest age of English Glory ; of the days 
of the fight of Cadiz; of the contest of Greville, in the 
ship 4 Revenge,’ against fifteen of the enemy, towed in 
unbeaten, in honour by his foes; of the gathering at 
Tilbury and the dispersion of the Armada; the burning 
of heretics ; the conquest of the New World ; the progress 
of the Reformation; the translation of the Bible; the 
sufferings of martyrs; the establishment of the National 
Church. All these took place in Bacon’s day. 

The reader has neither time nor inclination to stay 
out the whole play, but the curtain will draw up on a 
state of society little less animated or lawless than the 
days of the Montagues and the Capulets. The theatre, 
the stage, the actors are colossal. Feudal pomp and 
magnificence still shed their lustre on sublunary things. 
Chancellors, prelates, ambassadors, and knights, pass and 
repass, with armed retainers at their backs. There 
are masques and tourneys, triumphs and processions. 
The stage seems filled with some splendid pageant. 
Yet ’tis the glory of a setting sun. Chivalry is dying 
and Puritanism is rising above the horizon. As the old 
life slowly ebbs away, the two dynasties in conflict 
unite like separate fires in one flame. Looking back we 
see a gulf as between two cliffs rent by the hand of 
Nature, a whole world of thought and feeling in the 
chasm between. Across this Shakspere strides. Like the 
old Colossus in that Rhodian promontory, he is splendidly 
honoured by the setting sun and the rising moon ; as he 
flames his light far into the blue iEgean, he flings back 
beams from both. 

B 3 


10 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF HIS DAY. 

Deeds, says Lord Coke, must be read by the light in 
which they are framed. If this is true of what men write, 
how much more true is it of what men act! The whole 
epoch of Bacon’s life was an era of vehement contrasts. 
Courage and intellectual independence were combined 
often in the same persons with great servility, and an all 
but profane loyalty. Barbarity and cruelty dwelt hard by 
extreme tenderness and deference to woman. A treachery 
and duplicity at court, in the days of his boyhood, hardly 
surpassed by that of the Borgias, and reputed to stop j 
neither at the Assassin’s knife nor the ready recipe of the 
poisoner, was found in conjunction with the warmest 
friendships, with the most enthusiastic zeal of personal 
service for kinsmen and friends. It was an age of 
great virtues and terrible vices—of intellectual splendour, 
of moral infirmity. Strength of desire stimulated cupidity ; 
intensity of will lent power to evil aspirations. 

Francis Bacon was the son of a judge who had diplo- < 
matically preserved his place through two reigns of 
opposite politics, religion, and character; it is said, by I 
an equal zeal in both creeds. Dudley, the reputed 
poisoner, the destroyer by secret practices, if rumour is to 
be trusted, of many lives, was the Queen’s first favourite at 
court. The open profligacy of women is a marvel to 
those who gaze on the unsullied page of Shakspere. But 
bad as was court life in Elizabeth’s day, it became even i 
more dissolute and abandoned in the reign of her suc¬ 
cessor. The sports and punishments of Englishmen were 
alike for their barbarity a marvel to foreigners. “ Bad 
deeds lived, but worse remained behind.” 

It was Francis Bacon’s calamity to be trained early in 



THE CAREERS OF PRUDENCE AND OF GENIUS. 11 

the atmosphere of courts. Before boys have mastered 
their horn-book, he knew something of that “ sweet aspect 
of princes which knows more perils than wars or women 
have.” He was as a child the plaything of the virgin 
Queen Elizabeth, then some forty years of age. He early 
learned how precarious was the path about the precipice 
which climbs to glory—how small a slight will make a 
monarch resent—how much it needs to make him forgive. 
His father had long trodden safely and surely. He had 
been the bosom friend, as he was the brother-in-law, of 
the great Lord Burleigh, for forty years the Queen’s 
prime minister — a man of moderate, rather than of 
splendid gifts, endowed with sound sense, whose maxim, 
“ Mediocria firma,” says more for his sagacity and 
prudence than for his courage or greatness of soul. Sir 
Nicholas, helped by Burleigh to his place, had become 
the honoured and trusted servant of the Queen. But 
Francis Bacon, the son, was of another nature, of a dif¬ 
ferent temper. 

Conscious of a superior ability, of more splendid endow¬ 
ments, He, with all the strength of a strong will, hungered 
and thirsted after power, and fame, and all that conse¬ 
crates Ambition as a duty. He lusted after public life; 
he felt it, perhaps, the only theatre for a man of his 
splendid accomplishments and oratorical gifts. What a 
courageous man would have won by daring, and an impe¬ 
tuous temper wrung in despite, from fortune, his cautious 
and obsequious nature, derived to some extent from both 
parents, would seek, by gentler means, by wise policy and 
wilier acts to win. But fortune is a woman as often won 
by storm as prayer, giving way to desperate wooers, and 


12 


FOR A TIME UNFORTUNATE. 


slighting the prudent and careful swain. Bacon’s life for 
many years was an unsuccessful one. He was up till 
nearly forty years of age that most unhappy of neglected 
beings, a briefless barrister, but narrowly escaping that 
other imputation, charged upon Fielding once, of being 
also a “ broken wit.” In the year 1601, when Bacon was 
forty years of age, he had done comparatively nothing to 
entitle him to respect. His volume of Essays, published 
in 1597, was, it is true, a success; but they were, as it 
should seem, a mere afternoon’s labour for his noble mind. 
They were only ten in number, and not a tithe of their 
present bulk. All his practice at the bar had been gained 
by cringing and begging from the Queen. He had dared 
little, and suffered much. All his deeply-laid policy of 
advancement, his hopes of preferment, his early visions of « 
promotion, of service in the state, and high employment, 
had been overturned by accident. This was his fate 
through life. What earthly wisdom could accomplish j 
Bacon achieved. What plot and counterplot, what subter¬ 
fuge and evasion, what protestation and flattery could 
reach, He gained. But who can constrain fate ? His 
•deepest policy was blown about by accidents. Cecil j 
L ord Burleigh opposed him, because he had a son, 
Robert Cecil, poor in gifts of person, and with a shrewd 
wit, but who was no match for his cousin Francis. 

The Queen disliked him ; took strange prejudices at his < 
acts ; wherefore he knew not. He deserted Burleigh, and 
hung on Essex ; played fast and loose ; made terms with 
both, and served neither; and when he bound himself 
firmest to Essex, Essex was ruined; and when he returned 
to Cecil, Cecil could afford to despise and spurn him. 






SUBSEQUENTLY SUCCESSFUL. 


13 


At last there was an opening to gain his sovereign’s 
favour, first as the friend, then as the enemy of Essex. By 
treachery to his best benefactor he could win the Queen, 
who now hated Essex as only a despised woman can, with 
that bitterness of hate which boys read of as the spretce 
injuria formce . He became treacherous, bartered his 
honour for promotion, and rises. Swiftly as he soars, 
his wings melt, for that Queen dies, and the friend of the 
man so cruelly betrayed is King. 

Again he plays for royal favour; plays high and wins. 
He is on the road to power. Now his brains have fair 
play ; now his wits have a chance. He labours on, like 
the mole, from point to point, but always crawling, always 
blind ; becomes Attorney General; will be, he thinks, 
prime minister by-and-by; when a child, with a baby 
face—a mere cub of a lad, not half licked—steps between 
him and the King’s favour, and dissipates his vision to the 
winds. He begins again ; toils surely and slow ; wins the 
favourite; again advances; becomes Lord Keeper, Lord 
Chancellor ; thinks now how he may spurn his patron, 
the cub; by-and-by, kicks at him, and to his amazement, 
the rebound nearly flings him from top to bottom of his 
hard-earned path. One blow more, and his ladder would 
have been flung from the tower, and he would have lain 
maimed and broken in the ditch. He begins anew, and 
for more than three years his path is still upward; and 
now he is crowned indeed, for he is made a peer. ’Tis 
his seventh triumph, so he counts it on his fingers; when 
there comes a blast as from a trumpet, and Francis Bacon, 
Lord Verulam, falls as by a thunder-stroke from his place. 

The People whom he spurned, and scorned, and defied, 


14 


TRUTH ABOVE ALL. 


have risen, and in a day he is overthrown. He, a son of 
Adam, is driven from the home he kept, the court he 
graced, the paradise he loved. He retires into contem¬ 
plation and an unquiet life, with the consolation, denied 
to some gamesters, that having played a large stake and 
lost, he has still a noble residue in “ vast contemplative 
ends ” left. 

This is, in brief, the story of Bacon’s life. But I have 
no right to forestall it. It is my duty simply to show how 
one of the mightiest intellects of the human race was also 
one of the meanest. Pope’s line has never been supposed 
to be absolutely exact, by any one above the meanest com¬ 
prehension. Neither Pope nor any other Poet could 
say who was the brightest, who the meanest among men. 
That power is left to wiser than mortal vision. But Pope 
could declare, what I affirm, and here attempt to prove, 
that Bacon was, if not the meanest, one of the meanest of 
mankind. The task may seem an ungracious one. I 
have his lordship’s warrant for it in the cause of truth. 
He has said that “ the apotheosis of error is the greatest 
evil of the understanding,” and has especially cautioned 
man against “ making knowledge dictatorial,” or believing 
only what he prefers to believe. 

Lord Campbell, concluding his discriminative life of 
Bacon, is constrained to speak thus : “ It is with great 
pain that I have found myself obliged to take an impartial 
view of his character and conduct; but to suppress or 
pervert facts, to confound moral distinctions for the pur¬ 
pose of holding him as a moral being, which should be 
kept well defined and well apart, would be a vain attempt 
to do honour to his genius, would not be creditable to 


JUDGMENT ON BACON’S CHARACTER, 


15 


the biographer who sees his faults, and would tend to de¬ 
moralize as far as it might be effectual.” Yet Lord 
Campbell leans to mercy ; he is more lenient than crimes 
such as Bacon’s deserve. He is awed by his great repu¬ 
tation, and, to use the image of Macaulay, has judged 
“ Manlius in sight of the Capitol.” He has even, in one 
or two instances, been led aside to praise undeservedly. He 
makes it appear that Bacon was diligent as a public 
servant. Yet even that merit cannot be conceded. His 
lordship draws a picture of his diligence in Chancery. 
This is Bacon’s own narrative. It is rebutted by contem¬ 
porary evidence. In 1617, Chamberlain writes that he is 
remiss as Lord Keeper ; and in 1619, that as Chancellor he 
is so tardy that an assistant keeper is suggested. Lord 
Campbell makes him retire to philosophic ease and con¬ 
tent. Even this must be denied. His begging letters 
for place and pension contradict even such a hope. Such 
instances are not given now in refutation, but are supplied 
merely to show that Lord Campbell, so far from being 
severely censorious has, if anything, been too favourable. 
If his decision is less laudatory than Macaulay’s, it is 
also less severe. Yet a book has recently appeared, 
which it will be my duty to notice, impugning his veracity 
and temper. No such book was needed. Its purpose is 
no less false than unnecessary, as I shall presently show. 
Yet I cannot conclude this chapter other than by express¬ 
ing my regret that the interests of truth force on me 
the task of justifying Pope’s verdict of “ brightest, meanest 
of mankind.” 


16 


HEREDITARY TRANSMISSION. 


CHAPTER IT. 

The attributes of blood and lineage have by universal 
consent been supposed to some extent transmissible. 
Without affirming, in all its consequences, an opinion which 
has, from unintelligent acceptance, degenerated into a 
prejudice, analogy illustrates the fact that temper and 
training, organization and capacity, are sometimes trans¬ 
mitted from sire to son. The same manly courage, the 
same love of liberty, the same Protestant predilections, 
inspired the great family of Nassau, through three or 
four generations. The Plantagenets were a Kingly race. 
The Tudors were all imperious, yet conciliatory, strong- 
willed and gracious, and, as it seemed, born to rule. Op¬ 
posed to this, Shakspere, a greater than all, had no 
ancestral distinction on either side. If from the blood of 
the Ardens he gained something, it is still clear that 
neither previous training, nor splendid ancestry are essen¬ 
tial to produce even the very loftiest aspect of human 
attributes. This is in the strictest analogy with every 
law regulating blood and race in the inferior animals. 
There must be inheritance of noble qualities on one side 
or the other; but they may be so remotely derived, tha 





THE LEARNED MOTHER. 


17 


it concerns neither Biographer nor Genealogist to trace 
them other than as matter of curiosity. 

In Bacon’s case, our genealogy may be brief. His 
father was a distinguished judge and statesman—the 
most successful, if not the ablest lawyer of his day. 
His mother was one of the most accomplished members 
of the most highly educated family in England. It is to 
this cause, doubtless, that much of Bacon’s genius is to 
be referred. It is needless here to insist on a possibility 
which forces itself on every person who has ever given 
consideration to the subject, that much of the splendour of 
the Elizabethan age, if not all of it, is directly attribu¬ 
table to a fashion of educating the female mind to an 
eminent degree. The mother of Francis Bacon was one 
of five sisters, all similarly learned, the daughters of Sir 
Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward VI. Having no 
sons, in pursuance of a theory that women could be as 
highly cultivated as men, Sir Anthony trained them in 
Latin and Greek, till they were as conversant with the 
learned tongues as the most polished scholars of the day. 
Francis Bacon justified Sir Anthony’s wisdom. His 
mother, Lady Ann, was not merely an able theologian, 
but was competent to correspond in Greek, and so accurate 
in her scholarship as to have translated Jewels 4 Apologia ’ 
into English, it is said, without the author being able 
to suggest a single correction. Whether this was a gallant 
compliment of the learned bishop, or he was more easily 
satisfied than authors of the present day, or the story 
must be accepted with limitations, it would be difficult 
to say. But in either aspect it says much for the lady’s 
learning. 


18 


THE WISE FATHER. 


Some of her letters to which we may have occasion to 
refer will prove her no mere pedant, but an eminently 
practical, worldly-minded, and sagacious woman, of a 
somewhat severe temper and a peculiar subtlety of dis¬ 
position, which, it is not unfair to suppose, she transmitted 
to her sons. In all her correspondence, no matter how 
trivial its purport, there is a strict injunction in each 
letter to burn or conceal it, which shows an apprehensive 
nature. So far as her character can be gleaned from 
her correspondence—and no history of this erudite lady 
is in existence—she was an admirable housewife ; and we 
shall find a vein of practical sagacity, a business-like 
aptitude, an energy in emergencies, in each of her sons, 
coupled with a singular reticence, and, it cannot be 
questioned, extraordinary diplomatic astuteness. 

It would be impossible to separate, from the scanty 
knowledge at our disposal, the father’s from the mother’s 
lineaments in the gifted son, Francis Bacon. His father, 
Sir Nicholas, was a man of undoubtedly solid gifts, with a 
happy and facetious humour, rather marred by a love of 
ease, and restrained by an unusual, but in those days of 
danger and change, not unnecessary prudence. An emi¬ 
nent historian has distinguished him as the type of a class 
of statesmen who were his contemporaries, “ who re¬ 
sembled each other so much in talents, in opinions, in 
habits, in fortunes, that one character, we had almost 
said one life, may, to a considerable extent, serve for 
them all.”* With this opinion it is impossible to concur, 
with the proposition following it. “ That they (Sir 
Nicholas and his contemporaries, Lord Burleigh, Sir 
* Macaulay, ‘ Life of Bacon.’ 


SIR ANTHONY COOK’S DAUGHTERS. 


19 


Walter Mildmay, Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Francis Wal- 
singham), were the first generation of Statesmen by pro¬ 
fession ”—it would be as difficult to disagree. This was 
a mere accident. With a Queen on the throne ; with the 
rival factions of York and Lancaster fairly at rest; with a 
growing and increasing foreign commerce and foreign 
relationship; with a wealth second to none of the con¬ 
tinental states; there was more scope in an established 
government for an age of professional statesmen. Of all 
these, William Cecil Lord Burleigh, was perhaps the 
greatest. Next in order ranged Walsingham, then pos¬ 
sibly Sir Nicholas Bacon. Lord Burleigh had married 
a sister of Lady Ann Bacon, the mother of the future 
philosopher, and thus was united in kinship with the 
Chancellor, Sir Nicholas. His wife, Mildred, was de¬ 
scribed by Roger Ascham as the best Greek scholar 
among the young women of England, Lady Jane Grey 
alone excepted. Another daughter, Katherine, who 
became Lady Killigrew, was not less distinguished, and 
became the maternal ancestor of the witty and licentious 
race of Killigrews. Elizabeth, the fourth daughter, was 
married twice, first to Sir Thomas Iloby, and after to 
Lord Russell. Margaret, the youngest, is the mate of 
Sir Ralph Rowlet. Undoubtedly of all the children of 
these five daughters, Francis Bacon is the greatest, and 
it behoves us to consider the character of his father, Sir 
Nicholas. 

His illustrious son has given us his estimate of his 
father’s character. 

“ He was a plain man, direct and constant, without all 
finesse and doubleness, and one that was of a mind that 


20 


PRUDENTIAL WISDOM. 


a man, in bis private proceedings and estate, and in the 
proceedings of state, should rest upon the soundness and 
strength of his own courses, and not upon practice to 
circumvent others.’’ 

As Bacon has in none of his works manifested a special 
apprehension of character, or a power like Clarendon s, 
of justly estimating men, his testimony of his father’s 
disposition can only be accepted at its worth. Every 
man looks more or less through his own eidolon; and if 
Sir Nicholas appeared to lack finesse to his son, it may 
have been that that son possessed it in a superabundant 
degree, and Sir Nicholas had thus an apparent rather 
than a real deficiency. A statesman and an official who 
was able to maintain, under two reigns of opposite 
religions and directly opposite policy, his position and 
power, may be supposed to have lacked neither prudence 
nor tact. It is probable, both from his decisions and 
speeches, that he was a man of large and solid mind, 
possessing great sound sense, and that to a certain heavy 
and placid temper, rather than to any other quality, we 
are to attribute the fact that we have no satisfactory 
memoir of him, and that his literary productions which 
have survived are few and inconsiderable in quality. 

He was the second son of Robert Bacon, of Wrinkstow 
in Suffolk, and was born at Chislehurst in Kent, in 1510.* 
He graduated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and 
having taken his degree, as the fashion then and for a 
long time remained, travelled into France, having entered 
himself a student of Gray’s Inn. On his return, he kept 

* Those interested, will find a long genealogical account of the 
Bacon family in Wotton’s * Baronage.’ 


“ DIRECT ” BUT NOT “ CONSTANT/ 


21 


his terms, and was in due course called by that Inn. In 
1532, he was admitted a student, four years after was 
made an ancient, and in the succeeding year, being then 
twenty-seven years of age, he was appointed solicitor to 
the Court of Augmentations, to be in nine years again 
promoted to the responsible and high official dignity of 
Attorney of the Court of Wards, a post not merely of 
honour, but of considerable power and pecuniary profit 
during the existence of the feudal times. Second only in 
its responsibility to the Chancellorship so far as the merely 
legal duties of that office are concerned. In 1547 Henry 
VIII. died and Edward VI. succeeded. In 1553 Mary 
ascended the throne. During the latter’s reign, although 
Sir Nicholas had manifested a stanch protestantism in her 
brother’s reign, he laid himself open to the accusation of 
deserting his creed, a satirical writer,* quoted by Lord 
Campbell, referring to his career, remarking that—“ His 
lordship could neither by the greatness of his beads, 
creeping to the cross, nor exterior show of devotion before 
the high altar, find his entrance into high dignity in 
Queen Mary’s time.” From this it would appear that the 
Bacons, neither father nor son, were of the material of which 
martyrs are made, and that the son’s estimate of the father’s 
character, as a man direct and constant, must, without any 
charge of flattery, be accepted with some limitation. 

In November of the year 1558, Elizabeth succeeded to 
the throne, and appointed, in December, Sir Nicholas 
Bacon to the responsible office of Lord Keeper of the 

* Parsons the Jesuit, the presumed author of the libel on the Cecils, 
and of the infamous book ‘ Leicester’s Commonwealth.’ (See Wood's 
‘ Athense Oxoniensis.’) 


22 


SIR NICHOLAS’ CONVERSION. 


great seal, chiefly, it may be assumed, through the in¬ 
fluence of his brother-in-law Cecil, who was her adviser at 
her accession, and the head of her first ministry. The 
office of Lord Chancellor had before this time been either 
held by some distinguished prelate or nobleman, usually 
by the highest dignitary of the church ; and her majesty, 
therefore, with her characteristic caution in departing from 
precedent, merely nominated Sir Nicholas Lord Keeper of 
the great seal, a post inferior in dignity, but, in the absence 
of a Chancellor, substantially the same, as the Lord Keeper 
of the great seal had heretofore acted as in part the 
deputy of the Chancellor when the two offices had been 
maintained in the same reign. Sir Nicholas, who had 
been a devout Catholic during Mary’s reign, now became ' 
as stanch a Protestant, taking the oath of spiritual supre¬ 
macy, which the ex-chancellor Heath had refused, his ij 
non-compliance having led to his deposition. 

On Wednesday, the 25th of January, 1559,* Elizabeth’s * 
first parliament met, being prorogued from the 23rd, on ; 
which day the writs were returnable, as it would seem , 
from the Journals; but it was not till Saturday, the 28th, 
that business was formally commenced and a speaker 
chosen. On this occasion, Sir Nicholas, the first law 
officer of the realm, the speaker of the House of Lords by 
prescriptive right, and the mouthpiece of her Majesty, , 
addressed both houses in the Lords, the Commons being 
called to the bar of the upper house, in a long, sensible, . 
and judicious speech. Eminently calculated by its temper 
to conciliate all persons, and showing throughout the force 
of the keeper’s motto, “ Mediocria firma,” being neither 




WISE COUNSEL. 


23 


disfigured by an affectation of erudition, nor of rhetoric, 
nor of law, as was too frequently the case, but being in 
all respects solid and politic. It may well be supposed 
that in a period of such great civil and domestic com¬ 
motion, the whole country divided against itself in religious 
matters, and the new throne being but erected on the 
ruins of an opposite creed, and a reign of antagonistic 
policy, that no small discretion was needed for the task. 

Opening with some disparagement of himself, and the 
weightiness of the occasion, Sir Nicholas first touched on 
the duties and obligations of the house in spiritual matters 
to conform to a wise discretion, to avoid disputatious or 
opprobrious language, or theological controversies more 
fitting for schoolmen than counsellors, to avoid the ex¬ 
tremes of licentiousness, on the one hand, and superstition 
on the other, the good King Hezekiah having no greater 
desire than her Majesty to do what is most acceptable in 
God’s sight; and that, encouraged by her example, let us 
set ourselves with all diligence “ to make such laws as may 
tend to the honour and glory of God, to the establishment 
of his Church, and to the tranquillity of the realm/’ 

He then proceeds to point out defects in the laws, sug¬ 
gesting that those which are too sharp need remedy, and 
that others being too soft and gentle require sharpening, 
asking them to “ reform all disorders, and things that be 
amiss; to contrive to make firm that which is good ; to 
detect and discourage those that be dishonest and evil; to 
execute justice in all points, to all persons and at all times, 
without rigour and extremity ; and to use clemency with¬ 
out indulgence or partiality. 

Proceeding to point out the excellent intentions of the 


24 


ELOQUENT PATRIOTISM. 


Queen, her desire to conciliate the love and goodwill of 
her subjects, whose virtues would need all the power and 
eloquence of an orator “in whom both nature and art con¬ 
cur, and not possible to me in whom both fail.” From 
this point, rising with his theme, he descants on the great 
loss of Calais; and if his manner were impressive, would 
at this point doubtless have seemed eloquent in spite of his 
own disparagement, for he asks, “ What man that either 
loveth his sovereign, his country, or himself, that thinketh 
of and weigheth the great decays and losses of honour, 
strength, and treasure, yea, and the peril that hath 
happened to this imperial crown of late time, but must 
needs earnestly and inwardly bewail the same ?” What 
greater loss than Calais, “which was in the beginning 
so nobly won, and hath so long time, so honourably and 
wisely, politically, in all ages and times, and against all 
attempts both foreign and near, both of forces and trea¬ 
sures, been defended and kept ?” Did not the keeping of 
this give new fear to our greatest enemies, and made our 
faint friends the more assured, and loather to break ? yea, 
hath not the winning and keeping of this led through¬ 
out Europe to an honourable opinion and report of our 
English nation ?” 

Who can read this passage, thinking of the dangers 
menacing the realm, of this little realm of England, this 
gem set in the sea, of this plain and heavy lawyer, this 
plodding and politic man, addressing the Lords and 
Commons of this realm, without feeling that the same 
courage, the same warlike spirit breathes in him as in those 
heroes of the Armada fight ? and that when he touches on 
the glory and dignity of his country, he rises in his theme 


Cecil’s chief ally. 


25 


like Themistocles, and becomes heroic in an assemblage 
of heroes ? 

In the works of Strype, in the Memoirs of Grindal, 
Parker, Whitgift, Aylmer; the Annals of the Reforma¬ 
tion, and the Ecclesiastical Memorials, various incidental 
notices of Sir Nicholas occur. From all these—from his 
various speeches and charges, the conclusion seems in¬ 
evitable, that if he fell short of those splendid gifts which 
have made so illustrious the name of his son, he vastly 
surpassed that son in his prudence, his sense of duty and 
integrity. 

As the second column of this great kingdom ; as 
Cecil’s safe and confidential ally in the establishment of 
the National Church, and in all those decided measures 
which that great minister commenced at the accession of 
Elizabeth, his ability for public business, and his renown 
as a statesman, must be considered proved. His position 
presumes that no ordinary talents were necessary to main¬ 
tain him in his power. The absence of brilliant qualifica¬ 
tions is evidence for the solidity of his understanding. If 
his fame has been overshadowed by the more dazzling 
attributes of his son, the soberer qualifications which 
could maintain a lawyer of undistinguished birth and name 
in so lofty a post, must not pass unrecognized. 

No record of his domestic life exists. He was, by all 
testimony, a cheerful, genial man. By his first wife he had 
three sons and one daughter ; by his second wife, two 
sons only. His private character was uniformly spoken 
of as conciliatory and affable. His promptitude in 
business, the justice and discretion of his decisions, his 
love and zeal for learning, have all in their turn received 
* c 


26 


TRIAL OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS. 


praise and acknowledgment at the hands of his con¬ 
temporaries. In Sir Thomas Naunton’s sketch of his 
character,* he is described as an “arch piece of wit and 
wisdom. He was a gentleman and a man of law [Sir 
Thomas makes a distinction], and of great knowledge 
therein. He was abundantly facetious, which took much 
with the Queen, when it suited with the season. He had a 
very quaint saying, and he used it often to good purpose, 
“ That he loved the jest well, but not the loss of his friend, 
and that verus quisque suce fortunce faber , was a true and 
a good principle, yet the most in number were those that 
numbered themselves; but I will never forgive that man 
that loseth himself to be rid of his jests.” 

He was appointed one of the commissioners to try 
Mary, Queen of Scots, for the murder of her husband; 
and in his inquiry into the evidence in this perplexing 
and intricate case, is said to have acquitted himself with 
honour. But at a subsequent conference (two years after) 
at which the Scots peers negotiated for her ransom, he 
made a peroration which, if it has been correctly reported, 
certainly must have given offence : breaking up the 
meeting by saying, <f All Scotland—your princes, nobles, 
and castles—are too little to secure the flourishing king¬ 
dom of England.’" 

In the Parliament which was called in the spring of 
1571 Sir Nicholas is again her Majesty’s mouthpiece. He 
opens by hoping that he will not be tedious to her Majesty, 
a not unnatural wish in a man now sixty-one years of age, 
and whose manner and style were likely to be less 

* Somers’ Tracts, vol. i., p. 265. See also Harleian MSS., vol. ii., 
p. 95. 


TRIAL OF NORFOLK. 


27 


vivacious than of old. The necessity of seeking the 
advancement of God’s honour and glory is again one of 
the opening topics; from this he advances to the reform 
of laws, from which he proceeds to weigh the necessity of 
due and proper provision for crown and state, in other 
words, subsidies; thence passing to consider the benefits 
of peace. One or two of the passages are worth tran¬ 
scribing. Speaking of the benefits conferred by her Majesty 
during her reign, he alludes to three in chief. “ Whereof 
the first and chief is setting at liberty God’s holy word 
amongst us, the greatest and most precious treasure that 
can be in this world, to the great benefit of our souls 
and bodies, and whereby also we are by a necessary con¬ 
sequence delivered and made free from the bondage of 
Roman tyranny.” On peace and war he says, wisely : “A 
man that would sufficiently consider all the commodities 
of peace, ought to call to remembrance all the miseries of 
war, for it is in reason as great a benefit to be deprived of 
one as to possess the other. Yet, if no other argument 
were needed, the necessities and miseries of our neighbours 
would show it.” 

The following year Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, 
-was tried for high treason. Sir Nicholas as a commoner 
did not personally assist or preside, but Lord Campbell, 
with some severity, charges him with some of the indig¬ 
nities inflicted on that unfortunate nobleman. 

The late Chancellor remarks, not without acerbity, that 
« as he affixed the great seal to the commission under which 
this mockery of justice was exhibited, and must have super¬ 
intended and directed the whole proceeding, he is to be 
considered answerable for such atrocities as depriving the 

c 2 


28 lord Campbell’s accusation of sik Nicholas. 


noble prisoner of the use of books, and debarring him 
from all communication with his friends from the time of 
his commitment to the Tower ; giving him notice of trial 
only the night before his arraignment; keeping him in 
ignorance of the charges against him till he heard the 
indictment read in court; and resting the case for the 
crown on the confessions of witnesses whom the council 
had ordered 4 to be put to the rack, that they might find 
the taste thereof.’ ” 

This statement of the occurrence is undeniably severe. 
That irregularities took place on the trial is clear from its 
report; that they were more than irregularities is doubtful. 
The law of evidence in the year fifteen hundred and 
seventy-two was not as clearly defined as in the present 
day; and the entire informality of proceeding, not to say 
its judicial cruelty, might easily be paralleled in any of the 
state trials of the period. 

The “ debarring him ” of access by his friends was no 
uncommon hardship; Essex and Raleigh were similarly 
restricted at a much later date. The exact frame of the 
indictment only was kept back. The duke himself merely 
says : “I am hardly handled, and have short warning and 
no books—neither book of statutes, nor so much as the 
breviate of statutes.” That he did not greatly suffer by 
the deprivation is clear from the excellence and accuracy 
of his defence; the quotations and legal references urged 
in its argument suggesting that Bracton had not been 
withheld, or had been accessible. The witnesses were 
simply as good as any then tendered in similar cases; and 
although the duke, in a sentence which even now makes 
the blood shiver, objects that Bannister was shrewdly 


Buchanan’s epitaph. 


29 


cramped (racked*) when he told that tale, the serjeant 
denies it by saying, “ No more than you were.” Neither 
is there proof that Bannister, nor the Bishop of Boss, nor 
Cavendish were racked ; Hickford may have been,, but his 
testimony is not impeached by the duke; and though, 
looking at the matter now, it may be thought that the 
duke was harshly tried on the evidence, it is as little to 
be doubted that the trial either of Essex or of Raleigh 
was a mere mockery compared with the duke’s. 

The duke was a Catholic, the government was Pro¬ 
testant : he had undoubtedly plotted, and sufficiently 
overt acts of treason had been committed to bring his 
offence within the statute. Whether the marriage had been 
arranged between him and Mary is not so clear; but 
sufficient evidence exists to satisfy the historian that 
his trial was not on the whole unjust, and, consequently, 
to clear Sir Nicholas of culpable severity, even if his 
complicity were more manifest than it is. 

This solid and worthy Chancellor—solid in another 
sense, for he had grown in his latter years exceedingly 
corpulent—died February 20th, 1579, and was buried in 
St. Paul’s Cathedral; a long Latin epitaph being written 
for his monument by his friend, George Buchanan, which 
styled him “regni secundum columen,” and which set 
forth his many virtues with the usual accuracy of such 
posthumous credentials. 

The testimony of his contemporaries, allowing for the 
disparagement of his singular obesity, is uniformly flatter¬ 
ing, without being warm or enthusiastic. In friendship, 
as in all else, his motto stood. Eor his connection with 
* Vide Note on torture at end of book. 


30 


SIR NICHOLAS JESTS. 


Burleigh was one of blood and interest rather than of self- 
denying amity. Hayward describes him “ as a man of 
great diligence and ability in his place, whose goodness 
preserved his greatness from suspicion, envy, and hate.” 
Fuller describes him as one “ cui fuit ingenium subtile in 
corpore crasso and Camden as “ vir prcepinguis , ingenio 
accerimo , singulari prudentia , summa eloquentia , tenad 
memoria et sacris conciliis alterum columen,” an estimate 
which must be considered just and accurate, and by no 
means exaggerated. 

Some of his repartees, which mark him as a man not 
without humour, have been detailed by his son, who, as is 
known, had the liveliest appreciation of a jest. Two are 
sufficiently good to deserve notice. One, his brief pun¬ 
ning answer to Queen Elizabeth concerning monopolies, 
which it would have done well for that son to have borne 
in mind, “ Licentia omnes deteriores sumus”—We are all 
the worse for licences. The other his well-known repartee 
to the criminal who claimed affinity with him on the 
ground of his patronymic being Hog, which relationship 
the Justice did not dispute; but parried, by the argument 
that Hog was not Bacon till it had been hung, and that, 
to complete the relationship claimed, the culprit should 
be well hanged, are proofs that at least “he loved his 
jest.” 

In conclusion, I may venture to pass on him the 
opinion; that he was a man of even brilliant solidity. 
So far as eloquence is concerned, Puttenham has said: 
“ Indeed, he was a most eloquent man, of rare wisdom 
and learning as ever I knew England to breed, and one 
* Lord Campbell, ‘ Lives of the Chancellors,’ vol. ii., p. 107. 


GORHAMBURY. 


31 


that joyed as much in learned men and good wits, from 
whose lips I have seen to proceed more grace and natural 
eloquence than from all the orators of Oxford and Cam¬ 
bridge.” A man of a pliant and diplomatic temper, 
neither independent nor unduly servile. Not so much dis¬ 
tinguished by scholarship as for law, and the justice of his 
decisions. His conduct at all times marked by patience 
and regularity ; and his intellect by that invaluable attri¬ 
bute, or collocation of attributes, known as common sense. 
In every respect save perhaps in his eloquence, in which 
concurrence must be made rather with contemporary testi¬ 
mony than with Lord Campbell’s estimate—a man who 
embodied in his character his desires when he selected the 
motto “ Mediocria firma.” 

In the year 1568, the tenth year of his Keepership, he 
had built at Gorhambury, in Hertfordshire, a magnificent 
seat, which Queen Elizabeth had on one occasion visited. 
Incidentally remarking that his house was grown too 
small for him, he happily replied, “ Not so, madam; 
your highness has made me too great for my house.” 
He was married twice ; first to Jane, daughter of William 
Fernly, by whom he had three sons and three daughters, 
the eldest afterwards knighted in 1611, by James, as 
Sir Nicholas Bacon, of Redgrave. His second wife was 
a younger sister of Mildred, the wife of Lord Burleigh, 
Ann Cooke, the mother of two sons only, Anthony, and 
the philosopher and statesman whose career we are now 
about to trace, Francis Bacon. 


32 


bawley’s brief genealogy. 


CHAPTER III. 

As Rawley, “his lordship’s first and last chaplain,” 
in the brief memoir furnished to his works, has expressed 
so clearly and briefly the opening facts of Lord Bacon’ 
life, no apology will be made for transcribing them, and 
thus presenting his statement at first hand. 

“ Francis Bacon, the glory of his age and nation, the 
adorner and ornament of learning, was born in York 
House, or York Place, in the Strand, on the 22nd day of 
January, 1561. His father was that famous counsellor to 
Queen Elizabeth, the second prop of the Kingdom in his 
time—Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the great seal 
of England, a man of known prudence, sufficiency, 
moderation, and integrity. His mother was Ann Cooke, 
one of the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, unto whom 
the erudition of King Edward the Sixth had been com¬ 
mitted ; a choice lady, and eminent for piety, virtue, and 
learning, being exquisitely skilled for a woman in the 
Greek and Latin tongues. These being the parents, 
you may easily imagine what the issue was like to be, 
having had whatsoever nature or breeding could infuse 
into him.” 


THE BALANCE OF OPPORTUNITIES AND GIFTS. 33 


“ His early years were not without presages of that 
deep and unusual apprehension which was manifest in 
him afterwards, which caused him to be taken notice of by 
many persons of worth, and especially by the Queen, who 
would often, from his gravity and the maturity of his 
discourse beyond his years, term him her young ‘Lord 
Keeper.’ ” * 

A child gifted with so wise and so educated a mother; 
with a father so renowned and favoured by fortune, and 
related so nearly to the prime minister of the time, Lord 
Burleigh, may well be said to have been born fortunately, 
and to justify those lines which “ rare Ben Jonson ” wrote 
to celebrate his sixtieth birthday (when Lord Chancellor), 
kept in state in the house of his birth, York Place. 

But all his connections, the happy accidents of his birth, 
the advantages of air and country breeding which were 
given by the noble estate of Gorhambury, were insufficient 
to secure to their possessor either health or good fortune. 
The child which was petted by a powerful monarch, and 
who was the son of one great statesman and the nephew 
of the Prime Minister, as well as allied to half the 
aristocracy, became in his old age a broken-down, neglected 
man—his transcendent gifts alike unable to secure him 
friends, or save him from the contempt of his enemies, 
or the open neglect of good and virtuous men, 

At twelve years of age Francis Bacon was entered at 
Trinity College, Cam bridge,F receiving his education under 
the care of the celebrated Dr. John Whitgift, “ then master 
of the college, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.” 
He remained at Cambridge until his sixteenth year, when 
* Hawley’s ‘ Eesuscitatio,’ 1651. f Birch. Rawley. 

c 3 


34 “ THE CHILD THE FATHER OF THE MAN. 

he was recalled and sent to France, to go through the course 
of travel Sir Nicholas had passed through before him. 
Under the care of Sir Amyas Paulet, then ambassador 
at Paris. Before departing he entered himself, ac¬ 
cording to the records of the Inn, a student of Gray’s 
Inn, with the view, no doubt, to a legal career. In 
September, 1577, we find Sir Amyas writing to his 
father: “ I rejoice much that your son, my companion, 
hath, by the grace of God, passed the hurt and peril 
of his journey. I thank God these dangers are past, 
and your son is safe, sound, and in good health, and 
worthy of your fatherly favour.” From all that can he 
gathered from his life in France, where he continued till 
his father’s death, in his twentieth year, it would appear 
that he was at this time a diligent student and no idler. 
A man nurturing dreams of ambition. An athlete pre¬ 
paring himself sedulously for the race. • A scholar devoted 
already to grave affairs. A man of fashion and of the world, 
devoting himself no less to politics, and to affairs of state, 
than to literature and philosophy, and betraying even at 
this time that ambition and sedulousness towards one end 
that marked his later career. To this extent the child 
was father of the man. 

On the testimony of Rawley, before he left the uni¬ 
versity, which must have been early in his sixteenth year, 
he had, with a singular independence of mind, conceived 
the dislike he retained through life to Aristotle’s system of 
philosophy, which then served as the basis of the logical 
and dialectical training of the university, “ being a philo¬ 
sophy only strong for disputation,” but barren in utility. 

On the testimony of the same biographer, he was sent 



FRANCIS BACON’S SOJOURN ABROAD. 35 

over by Sir Amyas on a commission requiring despatch 
and secrecy, “ of which he acquitted himself with 
applause.” This is perhaps apocryphal. 

After Sir Amyas Paulet’s recall, in November, 1519,* 
he made a tour through the southern and western 
parts of France, locating himself, for a time, at Poitiers. 
Here probably he wrote his ‘Notes on the State of 
Europe and it was during this residence abroad that he 
invented a method of writing in cipher for use in poli¬ 
tical and diplomatic services, which he himself considered 
sufficiently ingenious, even after the lapse of years, to 
deserve a place in the ‘ De Augmentis.’ 

In his twentieth year his father’s sudden death, in 
February, 1580, by a cold, which terminated fatally 
after an illness of only a few days, led to his immediate 
return ; and from this period we have to trace Bacon’s 
independent career as a man of action and a working 
member of the commonwealth. 

* Birch. 


36 


BLIGHTED HOPES. 


CHAPTER IV. 

As may naturally be supposed, by training and educa¬ 
tion Bacon must have considered himself entitled to pre¬ 
ferment at the hands of the Queen or of his uncle 
Burleigh. His views and tendencies, on his own testi¬ 
mony,^ were to the public service. He had already 
passed some years in qualifying himself for official labours. 
As Sir Nicholas Bacon’s son he was entitled to hope for 
her Majesty’s active interest in his welfare, as well as that 
of his father’s old colleague, and near kinsman, Burleigh. 
Notwithstanding his high office held so many years, the 
Lord Keeper had died poor, leaving his estate at Gorhain- 
bury to his eldest son by his second wife, Anthony. Francis 
was thus left almost unprovided for. The more so that 
although his father intended to make a provision for him, 
and had placed a large sum of money aside for the 
purpose, yet the intention had been frustrated by his 
sudden death.* The future statesman’s bright hopes of 
advancement are dead in an hour. The opening path to 
glory is closed. Henceforward his destiny is to labour ; 
and although the road is smoothed by his father's name, 
and high position, as well as by his noble relationship, 
* Hawley. Birch. 




THE YOUNG ADVENTURER. 


37 


yet he will find a struggle upward without money, even 
with genius, none too easy. His patrimony is merely a 
rateable proportion with his four brothers of the fund 
intended once for his especial benefit. 

In his twentieth year he first settled himself as a law 
student in chambers in Gray’s Inn. Two years after, 
according to the records of the Inn, he was called. 
On Feb. 10, 1586, there is an order that he may have 
place with the readers at the readers’ table, but not to 
have any voice in pension, nor to win ancienty of any that 
is his ancient, or shall read before him. 

If he entered, as is probable, before leaving for France, 
the favour had been conceded to him of a special admit¬ 
tance out of commons. This is in accordance with Lord 
Burleigh’s notes appended to the order of the Benchers 
preserved in the Lansdowne MSS.* These show that the 
Inn conferred on him the following favours, doubtless in 
honour of his illustrious father, or in deference to the 
interest of Lord Burleigh, who was of the same Inn. 

1st. A special admittance to be out of commons, on 
account of his going abroad and justifying the supposi¬ 
tion that his entry then took place. 

2nd. Admission to precedence of forty of his compeers. 

3rd. Utter barristership at the end of three years. 

4th. Admission to the high or readers’ table, the order 
of Feb. 18, 1586. 

From this record we perceive that Francis Bacon 
entered the law under favourable circumstances. His 
father was the first Bencher of Gray’s Inn. Burleigh 
maintained his influence and connexion with it almost till 
* Lansdowne MSS., vol. 51, let. 6. 


38 


FAVOURS GRANTED TO BACON. 


his death. From these circumstances, and the fact that 
the young student was the nephew of the Prime Minister, 
these special favours were no doubt extended to him. 
Curiously, some of the earliest letters that have been pub¬ 
lished, or that may be presumed to exist, are to the Lord 
Treasurer and his wife, asking their influence with the 
Queen in his behalf, and are now subjoined. But before 
disposing of his career as a law student, it may be noticed 
that the favours above alluded to as extended to him, and 
which made him a Bencher of his Inn at the early age of 
twenty-six, were perhaps not wholly gratuitous, but were 
in part the result of his own perseverance and energy. 
Thus in a letter written in fifteen hundred and eighty- 
six, to Lord Burleigh, there occurs the following phrase, 
which suggests at least the presumption of some under¬ 
hand or doubtful practice having been attempted to gain 
the unusual favour of being called within the Bar. 

.“ And I protest simply before God, I sought 

therein an ease in coming within bars, and not any 
extraordinary or singular note of favour. And for that 
. your Lordship may otherwise have heard of me, it shall 
make me more wary and circumspect in carriage of 
myself/’* .... 

Early in 1580, Bacon had settled as a student in 
chambers in Gray’s Inn. The first proof of his residence 
of any importance, is contained in two letters, written by 
him in September, to his uncle and aunt Burleigh, and 
preserved in the Lansdowne MSS. They form the first 
of a series of “ begging letters,” which for pertinacious 

* Lansd. MSS. 51, Art. 5. Also printed in Montagu, from which 
this is copied, in vol. xv., p. 23, and vol. xiii., p. 473. 



THE STUDENT-AT-LAW. 


39 


audacity and bold importunity, have perhaps never been 
equalled. For a time, it cannot be doubted, this species of 
composition, too frequently indulged in, hindered their 
author’s advancement. The first is 

44 TO LADY BURLEIGH TO SPEAK FOR HIM TO HER LORD. 

“My singular good Lady,— 

44 1 was as ready to show myself mindful of my duty 
by waiting on your ladyship at your being in town, as 
now by writing, had I not feared lest your ladyship’s 
short stay, and quick return might well spare me, that 
came of no earnest errand. I am not yet greatly perfect 
in ceremonies of court, whereof I know, your ladyship, 
knoweth both the right use, and true value. My thankful 
and serviceable mind shall be always like itself, howsoever 
it vary from the common disguising. Your ladyship is 
wise , and of good nature to discern from what mind every 
action proceedeth and to esteem of it accordingly . This is 
all the message which my letter hath at this time to 
deliver, unless it please your ladyship further to give me 
leave, to make this request unto you, that it would please 
your good ladyship in your letters, wherewith you visit 
my good lord, to vouchsafe the mention and recommenda¬ 
tion of my suit; wherein your ladyship shall bind me 
more unto you, than I can look ever to be able sufficiently 
to acknowledge. Thus in humble manner, I take my 
leave of your ladyship, committing you, as daily in my 
prayers , so, likewise, at this present, to the merciful pro¬ 
vidence of the Almighty. 

44 Your ladyship’s most dutiful and bounden nephew.” 

The lines italicised above are so marked, to point out 
features, which occur again and again, throughout the 
Bacon correspondence, which prove the character of the 
philosopher chiefly formed. Singularly the phrase 
44 bounden ” is also retained through life, when writing to 
persons from whom benefits are anticipated. His letter 


40 


LETTERS TO LORD BURLEIGH. 


to the Treasurer is longer, and therefore need only be 
printed in part, especially as it is merely to the same effect. 

“My singular good Lord,— 

“ My humble duty remembered, and my humble thanks 
presented for your lordship’s favour and countenance, 
which it pleased your lordship, at my being with you, to 
vouchsafe above my degree and desert. My letter hath 
no further errand but to commend unto your lordship the 
remembrance of my suit, which then I moved unto you; 
whereof it also pleased your lordship to give me good 
hearing, so far forth as to promise to tender it unto her 
Majesty, and withal to add in the behalf of it, that which 
I may better deliver by letter than by speech ; which is 
that although it must be confessed that the request is rare 
and unaccustomed, yet if it be observed how few there be 
which fall in with the study of the common laws, either 
being well left or friended, or at their own free election, 
or forsaking likely success in other studies of more delight, 
and no less preferment, or setting hand thereunto early, 
without waste of years, upon such survey made, it may be 
my case may not seem ordinary, no more than my suit, 
and so more beseeming unto it.” 

This, it must be confessed, is not perspicuous. The 
young Francis Bacon already possesses a certain reticence 
which disinclines him to speak freely. The above sen¬ 
tences are given in full, because it is difficult to arrive 
at their meaning by giving a part only. The remainder 
of the letter, couched in similarly obscure phraseology, 
asks Lord Burleigh to use his influence with the Queen 
for him. Expresses an opinion that her Majesty will need 
no trial or experience of the person recommended, when 
so good an opinion exists “ of the person which recom- 
mendeth.” He hopes Lord Burleigh will be his patron, 
and account him “ one in whose well being your lordship 


FRANCIS’ EARLY AFFECTION FOR THE QUEEN. 41 

hath interest,” concluding by “ committing you as daily 
in my prayers, so, likewise, at this present to the merciful 
protection of the Almighty. 

“ Your most dutiful and bounden nephew, 

“B. Fras.” 

The next is a letter printed in Strype, in the * Annals 
of the Reformation.’* Burleigh has spoken to the Queen 
in his nephew’s favour, and he sends a very long and 
dutiful letter of thanks in return. 

“ My singular good Lord,— 

“ Your lordship’s comfortable relation of her Majesty’s 
gracious opinion and meaning towards me, though at that 
time your leisure gave me not leave to show how I was 
affected therewith, yet upon every representation thereof 
it entreth and striketh so much more deeply into me, 
as both my nature and duty presseth me to return some 
speech of thankfulness.” * 

In substance the letter is as follows:— 

It is a great encouragement to him “ to encounter with 
an example so private and domestical of her Majesty’s 
gracious goodness and benignity being made good and 
verified on his father’s posterity during their nonage.” 
His loyal and earnest affection to the Queen is not the 
least of his, Francis’, inheritance, he trusts to receive 
God’s grace in his labours, and that what diligence can 
assist him to, he will attain, fears that his modesty may 
prevent the proper display of his gifts, but hopes her 
Majesty will credit them, and that when the occasion 
arises, no further protestation will be needed. In the 
mean time howsoever it he not made known to her Majesty 
yet God knoweth it through the daily solicitations ivhere- 
* Yol. IV., page 591 ; Oxford Ed., 1824. 


42 the student’s loye of beauty. 

with I address myself unto him in unfeigned 'prayer for 
the multiplying of her Majesties prosperities ; concluding 
by signing himself, 

44 Your most dutiful and bounden nephew, 

“Fra. Bacon.” 

Here fancy may without licence depict the sedate Bacon, 
prematurely wise, worldly, and ambitious, keen in his appre¬ 
ciation of the ideal and beautiful, a worshipper of nature, of 
the pomps of the flesh and the lust of the eye, bound down 
to the desk, and fettered to that jealous mistress the law. 

And here that love of beauty, which resembled more 
that of an Athenian citizen than of an Englishman, which 
shows the touch of kin, between Genius in the most dis¬ 
tant ages, his love of flowers, of pictures, of fine apparel, 
of sumptuous and * elegant furniture and trappings which 
was shown so much in his mature age, must have cost 
many a heartache in its repression. Francis Bacon was 
a vain man. He had been nursed in the lap of luxury. 
The age of Elizabeth was an age of more splendid 
magnificence in apparel, of more gratification to the eye 
than any which preceded it; and Bacon’s love of these 
things, conjoined with his ambition, made him even more 
a slave to them than his contemporaries. Yet even here, 
in the Sahara of Gray’s Inn, he attempts to beautify and 
adorn what he cannot create anew. He cannot make the 
retreat of law as pleasant as the groves of Attica, or the 
gardens of the Sophists, but he will improve the common 
garden of the Inn. During his residence in chambers, he 
devoted, it would seem, some time and expenditure to the 
embellishment of the gardens and the records of the corpo- 


THE DRESS OF STUDENTS. 


43 


ration contain entries of large sums, paid to Mr. Bacon for 
its decoration and adornment at a later period of his life.* 
We unhappily know little of Bacon’s personal habits 
at this time, none of his biographers having thought fit to 
dwell on them. Just as in Shakspere’s life there is a gap 
between his boyhood and the period in which he appeared 
on the world’s stage as a man with some reputation in the 
world. In 1586, he is an M.P.f and a bencher of his 
Inn. Between nineteen and twenty-five he is engaged 
in the drudgery of the law, working obscurely as a student; 
without question dividing his time, as a modern philoso¬ 
pher and lawyer did, between law and science ; convert¬ 
ing his chambers into a laboratory, and in spite of the 
jealousy of the law, spending at least as much time in 
philosophy as in the dry study of ‘ Uses and Trusts,’ or 
the issues of 4 Taltarum’s Case.’ 

In those days the legal student, like the student of 
divinity, had a grave and reverend character to sustain, 
which he has not to-day. There was about him that 
isolation of profession, which was maintained in its integrity 
in every guild and profession and w^alk of life. He was to 
be known by his apparel and his soberness of mien. His 
dress was arranged by statute, and his beard was to be 
only of a fortnight’s growth ; £ he was not allowed in his 
hose or doublet to wear any light colours, except scarlet 
and crimson, or wear any upper velvet cap or scarf, or 
velvet shoes, or feathers or ribbon in his cap; neither 
Spanish cloak, sword and buckler, nor rapier.§ 

* Dugdale’s ‘ Jurid. Orig.,’ p. 273. 

f D’Ewes, 393. 1 Dugdale’s ‘Jurid. Orig.,’ p. 281. 

§ This unrelenting severity was modified by a statute permitting a 
three weeks’ beard, in 1557. 


41 


INNS OF COURT. 


His hair was to be cropped to a sober length. He 
was fined if he ruffled it in the City or at Paul’s with 
the rest of the gallants in cloaks, hat, or with boots and 
spurs. He was not allowed to carry a sword in hall. 
Nothing more than his dagger or knife. Nor go into 
the fields without his gown, nor wear his gown to the 
City. Regulations not unnecessary when we know the 
strength of religious zeal and of faction, in a country so 
strongly divided between opposite religious opinions, 
and the ready cut and thrust humour of the age, as is 
indeed shown by an instance in which a member of Bacon’s 
Inn in 1597, entering the dining hall with two men with 
swords, made an attack on one of the members with a staff, 
and then drawing a sword, or taking it from one of his 
attendants, made good his escape, the person assaulting 
being no less than the future Attorney-General Davis, 
nominated to the Lord Chief-Justiceship in 1586, and 
the Barrister assailed being Martin, afterwards recorder 
and M.P.* 

Inns of court f at this time, occupied a political position, 
and received the recognition of the court, the Queen 
frequently honouring their masques with her presence. 
These latter, which, with certain periodic festivities, were 
on a grand scale, and a considerable display of barbaric 
and feudal magnificence were accompanied by pro¬ 
cessions. In January 1561 and 1562, the students’ 

* Dugdale’s * Orig.,’ pp. 147, 148. 

f This phrase is equivalent to that of a Legal College. The Legal 
University is divided into four Colleges, or Inns of Court:—Middle 
Temple, Inner Temple, Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn. They are called 
“ of court,” to distinguish them from the other Inns not of court:— 
Staples’ Inn, Barnard’s Inn, &c.—once connected, now dissevered. 



MASQUES AND F^TES. 


45 


plays of ‘ Ferrex and Porrcx ’ were enacted before Queen 
Elizabeth. At Shrovetide, 1567, the Gray’s-Inn men 
presented her Majesty with divers shows; and in 1587 
they played a comedy in their hall at which Lord Burleigh 
was present, and at which, no doubt, Bacon assisted. 
In 1588, February, they played before the Queen in a 
masque at Greenwich, and we find on that occasion Mr. 
Francis Bacon and Mr. Yelverton (his friend) were present, 
and that their names occur among the dressers of the 
shows. In 1594 the revels of Gray’s Inn were on an 
unprecedented scale of magnificence, lasting from Dec. 
20th, St. Thomas’s Eve, to Twelfth Night, and winding 
up at Candlemas Day by a grand water party on the 
Thames, and a magnificent procession of more than a 
hundred horse to Gray’s Inn. In this splendid hospitality 
the Lord of Misrule, Henry Holmes of Norfolk, Duke of 
High and Nether Holborn, &c., was invited at Shrovetide 
with his mock court, by the queen, and entertained at 
Greenwich, where the knights of this new round table 
fought at the barriers and performed a masque, receiving 
a princely donation from the Queen’s hand for their 
gallant services. 

But the fact was that the shows of the inns of court 
were an institution as fixed as the laws of the realm. 
There were days set apart for revels. The masques, 
dinners, and entertainments were as settled as the disci¬ 
pline of the law. Certain great days were consecrated to 
fun and pastime—The Eve of St. Thomas, Christmas 
Day, St. Stephen’s Day, New Year’s Day, Candlemas 
Day; some of the following ordinances being enforced, 
no doubt to the great annoyance of the diligent student. 


46 


PORTRAIT OF BACON. 


“ At night before supper are revels and dancing, and so 
also after supper, during the twelve days of Christmas. 
The ancientest master of the revels to sing a carol or 
song both after dinner and supper. At the grand banquets 
on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, the hall is to 
be furnished with scaffolds to sit on, for ladies to behold 
the sports on each side, which ended, the ladies are to be 
brought into the library, unto the banquet there.” The 
three great days of revels were All Hallows, Candlemas, 
and Ascension, All Hallows and Candlemas being the 
chief. 

In these revels we may well fancy Bacon taking a part. 
His contemplative face flitting here and there among the 
gaily apparelled courtiers, himself not the least bril¬ 
liantly attired among the throng. His expression is 
already tinged with melancholy. That habit of studying 
at night, which Lady Ann so much condemns, has robbed 
his cheek of some of its colour. He is of middle height, 
with a lofty and slightly receding forehead, broad across 
the temples, not exactly handsome, but with a benevolent 
smile about his mouth. His frame is sufficiently robust 
looking, but not elegant. Into all the humours of the 
scene he now and again enters with enthusiasm. 

Here we are compelled to differ a little from Lord 
Campbell on a trifling matter of fact. His lordship con¬ 
siders that Bacon was favoured by his Inn on his own merits 
in his appointment to the Lent readership. “ So great a 
favourite was he with his Inn that in two years more 
he was made Lent reader.”* Yet he was made reader only 
in Lent 1588, which was no doubt in his regular turn, 
* Lord Campbell, vol. ii., p. 275. 


DANGER OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS. 47 

and was not made double reader till Lent 1600,* twelve 
years after,* so that their favouritism, if any, stopped 
suddenly short; nor do I think that his reputation in his 
profession induced the Queen to appoint him her counsel 
extraordinary, but rather his father’s name and worth and 
his uncle’s interest concurring, for her Majesty’s opinion 
was not great of his legal studies we know. 

In the same year of 1586 we also find him in par¬ 
liament, being mentioned as one among several others, as 
following suit of Lord Burleigh and Sir Christopher 
Hatton, courtiers, both in very vehement declamations 
against Mary, Queen of Scots, but recently condemned to 
death, charging her with treasonable practices, and de¬ 
manding the execution due to her deserts. Parliament 
was called by writ for the 15th, but did not sit till the 
29th, and then merely for the passing of routine business.! 
It had been called avowedly for the purpose of dealing 
with the unfortunate Queen, and Nov. 3rd, the Lord Chan¬ 
cellor proceeded to open the matter, followed by Lord 
Burleigh in the Lords. On the 3rd, Sir Christopher 
Hatton opened in a very violent speech, in the Commons, 
on the same subject, ending “Ne pereat Israel pereat 
Absalom.”! 

It was on this subject adjourned to the following day, 
that we find Mr. Bacon speaking and seconding his uncle 
and the court. The state of feeling at this time makes it 
probable that from inclination, as well as any other cause, 
he would have adopted this side ; but from this it is clear 
that if he were not in under Burleigh’s auspices, he was 
there as his follower. 

Mr. Bacon being in parliament, and having broken the 
* Dugdale, p. 295. f D’Ewes, ‘ Parliamentary History,’ p. 838. 


48 


FRANCIS BACON IN PARLIAMENT. 


ice within a week of his first entry, is not reported as having 
spoken again during the session ; but the accounts of the 
parliament at this time are so meagre that he may have 
done so without its being recorded. But in the new par¬ 
liament, called in February 1589, we find his name 
again. This parliament was called on account of the 
defeat of Spain and of the Armada, to meet by grants of 
money the expenses of the expedition. Action during the 
past year had superseded debate. 

On February 17th, one of the members complained that 
a speech made in the House had been reported, and that 
he had been rebuked sharply for it by a very great person. 
This complaint was suddenly stopped by the Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, who called the attention of the House 
to a grant of treasure proposed to the Queen. Referring 
by name to Mr. Francis Bacon, one of the committee, who 
had made notes on the subject, he, the Chancellor, desired, 
with the consent of the House, they should be read. The 
permission was accorded, and the notes read, Mr. Francis 
Bacon being summoned before them. From this it would 
appear that he is still following in the footsteps of his uncle, 
who rewards him about this time with the reversion of the 
registrarship of the Star Chamber,* an office worth 1000Z. 
a year, which, with his usual humour, he said, “ mended 
his prospect but did not fill his barn.” The parliament 
was dissolved March 29th, and thence till 1593, we hear 
little of him in public.! 

* Oct. 22, 1589. Murdin, p. 792. Grant to Francis Bacon as clerk 
of the council of the Star Chamber. 

t Lord Campbell errs in calling Bacon’s speech in 1593 “ his maiden 
speech,” and in supposing this was his first appearance in parliament. 
(Yol. ii., p. 279.) 




THE BRIEFLESS BARRISTER. 49 

As during this period none of the legal reporters allude 
to him, the conclusion is inevitable—that Bacon, notwith¬ 
standing the honours with which he was treated by the 
Benchers of his Inn, was not honoured by the attorneys 
with briefs. If he were a good lawyer, he had no oppor¬ 
tunity of displaying his attainments, and from his nine¬ 
teenth to his thirty-second year, had ample leisure to 
cultivate those scientific and literary pursuits to which he 
was much addicted. But it is also evident that Bacon longed 
for more substantial power than books conferred, or than 
posthumous fame would give. He was not, like Shak- 
spere, content either with his reputation in future ages, or 
with peaceful competency and rural life. Parliament 
being up, there was no opening for him to make 
headway there. Practice shunned him and his law failed, 
while his means of livelihood were scanty. So we find 
him in 1592, the thick darkness before the forthcoming day 
of a new parliament, oppressing him, writing to Burleigh 
the following mournful letter—mournful, because it shows 
his ambition and his disappointment. It is not dated, but 
the age mentioned determines the date. 

“My Lord,— 

“With as much confidence as mine own honest and 
faithful devotion unto your service, and your honourable 
correspondence unto me, and my poor estate can need in 
a man, do I commend myself unto your lordship. I wax 
now somewhat ancient; one-and-thirty years is a great 
deal of sand in the hour-glass. My health, I thank God, 
I find confirmed; and 1 do not fear that action shall 
impair it, because I account my ordinary course of study 
and. meditation to be more painful than most points of 
action are. I ever bear a mind in some middle place 
that I could discharge, to serve her Majesty; not as a 

D 


50 


VAST CONTEMPLATIVE ENDS. 


man born under Sol, that loveth honour, nor under 
Jupiter, that loveth business ; for the contemplative planet 
carrieth me away wholly ; but as a man born under an 
excellent sovereign that deserveth the dedication of all 
men’s abilities. Besides, I do not find in myself so much 
self-love, but that the greater parts of my thoughts are to 
deserve well. If I were able of my friends, and namely 
of your lordship, who being the Atlas of this Common¬ 
wealth, the honour of my house, and the second founder 
of my poor estate, I am tied by all duties, both of a good 
patriot, and of an unworthy kinsman, and of an obliged 
servant, to employ whatsoever I am to do you service. 
Again, the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move 
me ; for though I cannot accuse myself that I am either 
prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my 
course to get. Lastly, I confess I have as vast con¬ 
templative ends as I have moderate civil ends , for I have 
taken all knowledge to be my providence (province), 
and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the 
one with frivolous disputations, compilations, and verbosi¬ 
ties ; the other with blind experiments, and auricular 
traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils ; 
I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded 
conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the 
best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity, 
or vain glory, or nature, or, if we take it favourably, phi¬ 
lanthropy, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be re¬ 
turned. And I do easily see, that place of any reason¬ 
able countenance doth bring commendment of more wits 
than of a man’s own, which is the thing I greatly affect. 
And for your lordship , perhaps you shall not find more 
strength and less encounter in any other. And if your 
lordship shall find now, or at any time, that I do seek or 
affect any place whereunto any that is nearer unto your 
lordship shall be concurrent, say then that I am a most 
dishonest man. And if your lordship will not carry me 
on, I will not do as Anaxagoras did, who reduced himself 
with contemplation into voluntary poverty. But this I 
will do, I will sell the inheritance that I have and pur¬ 
chase some lease of quick revenue, or some office of gain 



CRITICISM ON STYLE. 


51 


that shall be executed by deputy, and so give over all 
care of service, and become a sorry book-maker. 

“ As a true pioneer in that mine of truth, which, he said, 
lay so deep ; this which I have writ unto your lordship, 
is rather thoughts than words, being set down without all 
art, disguising, or reservation ; wherein I have done 
honour, both to your lordship’s wisdom, in judging that 
that will be best believed of your lordship which is 
truest: and to your lordship’s good nature in retaining 
nothing from you. And even so I wish your lordship 
all happiness, and to myself means and occasion to be 
added to my faithful desire to do you service.” 

I have printed this long and in part involved commu¬ 
nication, because in the absence of any more interesting 
data, such correspondence, written without view to publi¬ 
cation, is one of the most absolutely authentic sources of 
history. From its tenor I deduce, that Mr. Francis Bacon 
is unhappy ; that he is devoted to philosophy already ; 
that he is not succeeding as a man of the world, or as a 
practical lawyer; that he fears Lord Burleigh considers 
him an antagonist of young Robert Cecil, for who else 
is “ nearer to his lordship ” than one of his sons ? that 
his uncle has already been his patron, has helped him for¬ 
ward so far, but is now somewhat neglecting him. 

Criticised as to style, it is neither clear nor business¬ 
like, nor to the purpose. The letters of Lord Burleigh, 
of Walsingham, of Essex, a younger man, contrast with 
it very favourably. Its merits are not of a kind to find 
grace in the eyes of the Lord Treasurer. It is foreign 
to Sir Nicholas’s style, full of conceits, of the fashion 
it is true, but not likely to find grace with a man of the 
world like Burleigh. It is in parts abject to meanness, 
of an affected humility which is set at nought by a daring 

d 2 


52 “ A SORRY BOOK-MAKER.” 

self-assertion not unworthy the young author of 4 The 
Greatest Heir of Time,’ not unworthy a man confident, 
as every man is of his own gifts, when he has them (some 
are equally confident when they have them not), but still 
not well or wisely to urge, in a search for employment. 

The writer makes no plea to Lord Burleigh’s affection ; 
asks nothing for his father’s sake ; but, as in every letter 
which he writes, attempts by mingled cajolery and flat¬ 
tery, and by pleading self-interest, to gain its end. The 
passage, “ that place of any reasonable countenance doth 
bring commandment of more w r its than a man’s own, 
which is the thing I greatly affect,” though not very clear, 
seems to indicate, what he has otherwise expressed, that 
he is prepared to sacrifice himself to his uncle’s fame, and 
that his wits are worth the buying. What can be meaner 
than the passage that follows — that Lord Burleigh 
“ shall not have strength and less encounter in any 
other?” It is vaunting, and self-glory, arid meanness 
mingled. He will not cross the old statesman. He has 
very “ moderate civil endshe will not step in before 
young Robert Cecil. And if his lordship will not consent, 
he will “ become a sorry book-maker.” As an isolated 
effusion of the author’s pen, it would be of little value. 
Interpreted by subsequent letters, by acts, we see that in it 
lies concealed, a true photograph of Lord Bacon’s mind. 

It may seem too much importance to attach to a letter, 
yet it cannot be denied that its arguments are of a selfish 
and mean kind ; that it is not daringly self-reliant, but 
that it is presumptuous without courage. A daring or a 
truly self-reliant man would have said, For yourself, sir, 
take care; I wall shake you in your seat—which would 




ANTHONY BACON. 


53 


have been more presumptuous still, but would have been 
courageous to boot. Bacon already has no belief in aught 
other than self. He insinuates that he does not desire 
honour, nor love business enough to be dangerous, and that 
he will be a most obsequious servant if he is rewarded. If 
he is not—he will do nothing rash to his lordship, nothing 
to resent, but will become “ a sorry book-maker/’ 

A Jesuitical letter, pretending to no art, but full of art, 
infused by conceits, by irrelevant assertions as to what the 
author purposed in philosophy, base in its flattery, servile 
in its protestations, selfish in its pleading, vaunting, “ I have 
taken all knowledge to be my province,” and false in its 
last asseveration, and herein, as in all his other correspon¬ 
dence, shall we trace Lord Bacon’s character fully formed. 

Two or three other of his epistles exist of this year. 
One is of February, 1592, asking his mother to apply to 
Lord Burleigh for the wardship of Alderman Hayward’s 
son. In those days the King has by the feudal laws the 
wardship in his grant of all the heirs of the nobility and 
gentry, which in the case of a wealthy child left without 
parents, is of course an eminently profitable affair. Whe¬ 
ther the application succeeds or not is not known. As he 
does not apply for it till after his brother Anthony’s return 
from France, it is possible that he urged the suit not at his 
own instance, but at his brother’s, who was then too newly 
arrived to ask the favour.* Of this brother Anthony, wKo 
will play a not inconsiderable part in these memoirs, we 
are bound to take notice. The eldest son of the second 
marriage, he has been a truant for nearly ten years, in volun¬ 
tary exile. While Bacon has been plodding at home, he 
* Letter, Birch’s ‘Memoirs of Elizabeth,’ vol. i., p. 72. 


54 


MATERNAL FEARS. 


has been engaged in a semi-official capacity abroad, and in 
keeping up political correspondence with the court—exiling 
himself much more for his own pleasure than the contentment 
of his friends, or the peace of mind of his lady mother. 

From Anthony’s voluminous correspondence, edited by 
Birch, much valuable information as to the political 
outline of the reign of Elizabeth has been gained. He is 
a man of sound practical ability, subtle, given to pleasure, 
notwithstanding infirm health, and of undeniable diplomatic 
skill. Sumptuous in his mode of living and extravagant, 
and eminently acute; but with a peculiar astuteness (to 
apply no harsher phrase) of character. A man worthy in 
every way to be brother to Francis Bacon—keen, prudent in 
counsel, and keeping a still tongue. One of those hangers 
about courts, who by sheer dint of brain eontrive to gain 
no small influence in affairs, unfelt and unseen, and with no 
further reputation than that of being a gossip or an idler 
with the unobservant. During his long residence abroad, 
news has been brought to his pious mother that he is 
becoming changed in religion, is straying dangerously 
near the Popish fold ; and every maternal feeling in the 
strong-minded lady’s bosom is roused at this danger to her 
eldest born. But little comes of it. His religious feelings 
are not very deep or likely to run to extremes, and he has 
at last returned, and his mother is ready to kill the fatted 
calf for the prodigal son, as of old, and forget all his follies 
and his (to her) harsh exile, in his present ill health. 

Some of the correspondence of Anthony Bacon offers 
admirable glimpses of the relationship of mother and 
sons, with an occasional reference to Francis, sufficient 
to give them an interest to us. Anthony had gone on 


THE UTTER BARRISTER. 


55 


his travels as far back as 1579, the year before his 
brother’s return, and was consequently not present at 
his father’s death; and soon after his departure com¬ 
menced correspondence with Sir Francis Walsingham, the 
secretary of state. 

About the middle of August, 1580, he returned to 
Bruges from Paris, from whence he removed to Geneva, 
where he took up his abode with the learned divine, 
Beza, who was sufficiently impressed either by his man¬ 
ners, character, or wealth, or his mother’s known piety and 
literary reputation, to dedicate to Lady Ann Bacon his 
‘ Meditations.’ From Geneva he went, in March, 1582, 
to Lyons, and from thence, having received a licence 
from the Queen to remain abroad three years longer, to 
Montpellier. In 1583, a letter from one of his corre¬ 
spondents, a Mr. Faunt, addressed to him at Marseilles, 
alludes to Francis as being “ sometimes a courtier and 
another letter from the same correspondent in August 
of the same year mentions “that Mr. Francis Bacon 
was now seen in his utter barrister’s habit abroad 
in the city, and therefore must needs do well.” In 
January, 1584, he is at Bordeaux, where he becomes ac¬ 
quainted with the great Montaigne, and remains for some 
months sick of an ague, his house the head-quarters of 
the Protestants, which causes a remonstrance to be drawn 
up against him by two or three priests, a proceeding which 
in these days goes far to peril his life. In this they de¬ 
clare that his pen is the director of all their commotions, 
and that his personal presence is their countenance and 
support Some of the parliament on this promptly suggest 
his recall, but fortunately Anthony has a friend at court. 


56 


SHOET OF FUNDS. 


Later in the year he goes to Bearne, possibly to escape 
the enmity of the Catholics, being already racked 
enough by his continued maladies. Here he in some way 
injures his foot, and is again compelled to stay longer 
than he purposed, which led to his acquaintance with 
Lambert Danaeus, who dedicated to him several of his 
works. From Bearne he probably removed to Montauban, 
where we find him in the beginning of 1585, writing for five 
hundred pounds, being sorely pressed and continuing ill. 

From Montauban he writes also in April to his old 
master, Whitgift, now Archbishop of Canterbury, who in 
May answers him cordially in return. At the same 
time, probably in April, and taking advantage of the 
same friendly messenger, he wrote for his steward, Hugh 
Mantell, to be sent to him ; but his correspondent, Mr. 
Demer, sends word back, in July, that Lady Bacon will 
not send him, and that she had importuned her Majesty 
to send a person to recall her son from abroad. In 
September, probably on some application of Lady Ann, 
we find Sir Francis Walsingham writing to him that his 
friends wish him home, not only on private but on public 
grounds, as a man, by his knowledge and long residence 
abroad, “ made very sufficient to serve both her Majesty 
and his country.” 

On the 10th of November, 1586, Walsingham writes 
again, this^ time by the Queen’s command, to return to 
England with as much expedition as he could; but even 
this fails to bring the truant back, so resolutely is he 
bent on remaining abroad ; and probably by some little 
diplomatic ingenuity he was able to move the Queen to 
grant him a little longer stay. 


Anthony’s escape. 


57 


During this year, however—the year of the Babington 
conspiracy, with Francis Bacon returned member for 
Taunton, with the descent of Spain imminent and threat¬ 
ening, and all the island moved and throbbing with com¬ 
motion, with prophecies and preachings, of dangers of 
invasion and fire, of conspiracy and murder, of battle and 
sudden death—there happens a little romantic episode to 
our otherwise politic invalid, Anthony Bacon. A designing 
mamma, Charlotta Arbaleste, wife of Philip de Morlay, 
one of the most considerable men of the Protestant cause, 
had determined that Anthony Bacon should marry her 
daughter. Whether Anthony was bent on bachelorship, 
was insensible to the young lady’s charms, or seeing 
through the innocent plot, made fun irreverently (as 
young men will) of the matron, is uncertain; but it ap¬ 
pears that he did “ unduly censure her scandalous excess 
in head attire,” which if he certainly couched his lan¬ 
guage as strongly was in the highest degree reprehensible. 
Probably he was a double culprit,—slighted the daughter 
and insulted the mamma; possibly the slight was an 
insult in itself. But whether one or both causes conjoined, 
a rupture of his friendship with the family ensued. In 
consequence whereof, being deprived of his immediate 
means of support (how is not shown), and being, more¬ 
over, hindered of some considerable sum of money ad¬ 
vanced in England, from the Sieur de Morlay, he was 
compelled to apply to the Bishop of Cahors for a loan of 
a thousand crowns. 

The bishop, a nephew of the Marshal de Briou, lent the 
money, but coupled it with a favour—the release of two 
priests then imprisoned in London, or an application to 

d 3 


58 


VISIT OF ALLEN TO LADY BACON. 


Lord Burleigh on their behalf. This intercession Anthony 
Bacon attempted, and wrote by his servant, Mr. Thomas 
Lawson, on their behalf. But Lord Burleigh, in place of 
releasing the priests, claps Lawson into prison, at the 
instance of Mr. Bacon's enraged mother. 

Neither the imprisonment of his envoy nor the anger 
of Lady Ann will lure the truant home. The month of 
August finds Mr. Anthony still abroad, and his friend 
Captain Allen, afterwards Sir Francis Allen, calling on 
Lord Burleigh on his behalf. The irate Lord Treasurer 
demands why his nephew does not return, and remarks 
“that he spends like a prince, being but an esquire,” 
though he will condemn him on neither head till he 
hears him speak. His lordship is pleased to express 
that Mr. Anthony “ had virtues and metal in himand 
ends the conversation by granting, what was most pro¬ 
bably the cause of Allen’s visit, a letter to Lady Ann 
in favour of Lawson. Armed with this, and with another 
from Mr. Francis to back it, Captain Allen calls at 
Gorhambury, to plead for the unhappy prisoner mewed 
up for no offence but that of being servant to a gentleman 
whose mother is enraged at his long absence. He is 
treated with every courtesy, and it needs very little fancy 
to picture the dashing young soldier, rapier at his side, 
with slashed doublet and ruff, calling on the precise, and 
Puritanic, and high-minded widow, in her lone and 
desolate mansion at Gorhambury. 

The widow of the great Lord Keeper has been robbed 
of her son, of her eldest born, and will not be pacified. All 
goes well for a time, for the lady has a courteous air, and 
is bountiful as becomes a lady. But human patience and 


LADY ANN BACON’S ANGER. 


59 


motherly love have bounds. So presently Captain Allen, 
with a good deal of circumlocution, being somewhat afraid 
of the lady’s stately manner—so little like that of the 
court ladies he is acquainted with,—shifting uneasily in 
his seat, begins: “ Mr. Anthony is still ill and unable to 
leave for England, but purposes immediately on his reco¬ 
very to return. He desires his best love to his mother, 
and all dutiful regards. But the fact is”—and here 
there comes a trying pause—“Lawson’s confinement is 
impairing Mr. Anthony’s health.” This is a masterstroke 
of the captain’s, who thinks he has the awful lad^ 
with the broad brow and pinched mouth at a disad¬ 
vantage. At last the murder is out, and the lady breaks 
forth. She expresses the utmost resentment at her 
son’s absence; “ why should he stay abroad thus ? what 
has she done that he hides himself from her?—it is 
unfilial. Away, and not even to close his poor father’s 
eyes ! Away from her all these years, and she pining in 
secret ! He is a traitor to God and his country. He 
has undone me, and sought my deathin her excite¬ 
ment, all her love and passion welling up, the pent-up 
grief of years, the yearnings of the fond mother. “ But 
though he seeks to kill me, and is doing this merely to 
kill me, he will not gain but one hundred pounds. I will 
take care he shall benefit nothing.” She will procure 
the Queen’s letter to force him back ; and when he comes 
back she will have him committed to prison with his man, 
Lawson, to bear him company. She declared she could 
not bear to hear of him : “ he is hated of all the chiefest in 
France, and cursed of God in all his actions,” and Lawson 
is at the bottom of it all. It is Lawson’s doings, and she 


60 


SIR FRANCIS DRAKE’S RETURN. 


is determined he shall never return to his master. She 
would not have cared if he had gone to the wars, and 
fought under the King of Navarre for the Protestant 
cause—there would have been glory in that; but to 
idle like a coward at Montauban, that was too bad. 
Besides, “ she has spent all her money and her jewels, and 
had borrowed the last money she had obtained for him 
of no less than seven different persons.” Captain Allen 
finds Mr. Francis Bacon “ very tractable,” and anxious to 
effect Lawson’s release, and to do as his brother desires ; 
but fear of his mother’s displeasure prevents him moving 
actively in the matter. 

Here, after the lapse of nearly three hundred years, 
comes again the touch of nature, amid all the diplomatic 
letters and worldly and wary correspondence, from 
which meaning has hardly to be gleaned only by induc¬ 
tion and care,—here is a mother of strong love, of tragic 
vehemence of passion and temper, wailing for her son, 
not in very dignified language of the coldly classic model, 
but such as the fondest mother would in reality perhaps 
use to-day under strong excitement, whether in Billings¬ 
gate or in Belgravia. 

Captain Allen sends by the same post a little new T s. 
That the Earl of Essex had chased Raleigh from the court 
into Ireland; that Sir Francis Drake had returned from his 
Portugal voyage; that the Countess of Leicester, Essex’s 
mother, had married Sir Christopher Blount; that Mr. 
Robert Cecil, son of Lord Burleigh, was shortly about to 
marry Lord CobhanFs daughter;—all of which specially 
concerns us interested in the life of Bacon, by-and-by. 
A little picture, moreover, of the times of these magic 


ANTHONY RETURNS TO ENGLAND. 


61 


days of romance and reality, of that happy age when all 
about seems lit with an air of poetry and splendour: Mr. 
Cavendish returns from sea and passes up the Thames 
amid the acclamations and cries of the thousands who line 
the banks in that glorious July weather, his marines and 
soldiers clothed in silk, his sails of damask, his topmast 
cloth of gold, and the richest prize ever brought at once 
into England. 

Anthony Bacon remains inexorable ; neither his mother’s 
pleadings, nor state affairs, nor the anger of his sovereign, 
nor his servant Lawson’s imprisonment, will bring him 
back. He removes from Montauban to Bordeaux, where 
he is in February 1591. Whence we find him pleading 
on behalf of a Mr. Standen, a Roman Catholic, to Lord 
Burleigh; _ his friendship with this gentleman, and his 
endeavours on his behalf, raising in England, especially in 
his mother’s mind, the presumption of his leaning to the 
Catholic faith. At last, in February of the year following, 
Mr. Bacon returns home. Immediately on his landing 
his cousin, Sir Edward Hoby, writes to congratulate 
him. He is the son of Elizabeth Cook. He cannot help 
being the bearer of good news to the returned prodigal. 
“ Her Majesty sent for me at the stroke of eleven at 
night, called me to her, among other things to ask 
if I had seen you since your return.” I told her high¬ 
ness that I had, and that Mr. Anthony, though he had an 
infirm body, had a mind much more infirm, by reason of 
not being able to see her most gracious majesty, through 
your infirmities. The Queen expresses her regret at his 
bad health, “ earnestly affirming, how that you had been 
greatly and from good hands recommended unto her.”*' 


62 


ESSEX AND BACON. 


Of course, now he is returned his mother will put him 
in prison—will punish him, for seeking her life, spending 
her money, and running after false gods. She’ll never 
see him more, the ungrateful boy. Of course she does 
nothing of the kind. She writes full of love and motherly 
counsel, as if he had never been away, charging him to 
set a good example to his brother. “ In hoc noli ad- 
hibere patrum tuum ad consilium aut exemplum,” and 
concluding with the hope “ that he will serve the Lord 
diligently, his brother Francis being too negligent there¬ 
in.” And now commences, on Anthony’s return, the 
friendship of these two brothers with the young and bril¬ 
liant Earl of Essex. The fates have taken up the skein 
of their lives. They will be tangled, and the web of 
Robert Devereux’s life is to be woven in with that of the 
future Lord Yerulam. The bright jewel of their young 
contract shall hang as a burden and millstone about the 
neck of the latter’s fame, to drag it down, to bring the great 
name of Bacon into the dirt, from which even the wings 
of his immortality can never free him, soar his reputation 
proudly as it may. How this friendship progressed, and 
all its results, must be told in another chapter. How it 
commenced will be a fitting end for this. 

It is a point of some little curiosity to know precisely in 
what manner the bond of amity first arose. Leicester, the 
father-in-law of Essex, had been Burleigh’s rival and Sir 
Nicholas Bacon’s enemy. At his instance the latter had 
been deprived of his seat in the Privy Council. In the 
year 1579 he had charged Anthony Bacon to the Queen, 
of being friendly with a certain Dr. Parry, then an exile 
for breaking into a chamber in the Temple, a spy and 


CAUSE OF THEIR AMITY. 


63 


agent of Burleigh’s, but a man of traitorous designs as it 
was supposed, and which well-nigh forfeited Anthony 
Bacon’s reputation with Majesty, especially as this Dr. 
Parry was of so factious a disposition as to be some years 
after executed.* He had during all his life been at enmity 
with the Cecils. Dying he bequeathed the legacy of hate, 
of rivalry, and opposed interest, to Essex. The rise of 
Essex was a death-blow to the supremacy of Burleigh’s 
second son Robert, who was his follower in statesmanship. 
The bond of enmity was doubly sealed by hereditary 
wrong and immediate injury. That this antipathy to Essex 
always existed in Robert Cecil’s heart is probable. That 
it became by nurture deadly and venomous is certain. 
Howsoever it arose, it became mutual. It ripened with 
years, till death alone satisfied it. That popular repu¬ 
tation at the time ascribed his death to Cecil is also 
known.f So that the question arises, How came the 
Bacons bound up with the Cecils, looking to Burleigh for 
advancement, bound by hereditary hatred and kinship 
to hate the Earl of Essex—for party feeling then ran 
high—to desert the Cecils and to hang their fortunes on 
Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex ? Here is in 
part the solution :— 

Bacon in his letter to the Earl of DevonJ states that he 
himself “ knit his brother Anthony’s service to be at his 
lordship’s (Essex) disposing.” But then he is writing to a 
friend of Essex, and Anthony is dead, and cannot refute 
him ; and we shall see anon, Francis Bacon will not scruple 

* 1585. 

f Harleian MSS. 

X Written, it must be observed, after James’s accession to suit the 
altered circumstances of the case. 


64 


THE TWO ADVENTURERS. 


a point or two to serve himself. Against this testimony 
of Francis Bacon, here is Anthony’s account of it to Essex, 
Sept. 12, 1596, who of all men is the best able to prove 
or disprove the truth of what he (Anthony) alleges. 

“ On the one side coming over (from France) I found 
nothing but fair words, which make fools fain, and yet 
even in these, no offer or hopeful assurance of real kind¬ 
ness, which I thought I might justly expect at the lord 
treasurer’s hands, who had turned my ten years’ harvest 
into his own barn without any halfpenny charge. And 
on the other side having understood the Earl of Essex’s 
rare virtues'and perfections, and the interest he had 
worthily in my sovereign’s favour, together with his 
special noble kindness to my Germaine brother,* whereby 
he was no less bound and in deep arrearages to the Earl, 
than I knew myself to be free and beforehand with my 
Lord Treasurer; I did extremely long to meet with some 
opportunity to make the honourable Earl know how much 
I honoured and esteemed his excellent gifts, and how 
earnestly I desired to deserve his good opinion and love, 
and to acknowledge thankfully my brother’s debt, pre¬ 
suming always that my Lord Treasurer would not only 
dislike, but commend and further this my honest desire 
and purpose.” 

Here is a reason why the Bacons should throw in their 
fortunes with Essex. They are what men in all ages, 
being wealthy and assured, call needy adventurers; 
that is, men of large desires and large necessities, with 
capacities of the noblest kind, seeking power, striving to 
overthrow the inequalities of fortune, and not too 
* Nathaniel, query. 


LORD AND VASSALS. 


65 


scrupulous how they gain their end, so that they do gain it. 
They are adventurers as distinguished from patriots. 
But then as patriotism, like love, is rarely seen dissevered 
from selfish consideration, or baser motive, rarely, per¬ 
haps never; they may be called, if it is preferable, 
patriots. Anthony at least was a patriot: he had stood 
by the Protestant cause. So had Francis when it cost 
him no danger but was gain. There are degrees in 
patriotism, and without claiming any high merit, the 
brothers may be styled conventionally patriots. 

Many many years after, when Essex is dead, when his 
friends come into power, when James I. expresses his belief 
that the Earl was martyred for his cause, then, and not 
till then, Bacon expresses to Essex’s dear friend, powerful 
at court, that his motive for joining Robert Devereux was 
patriotism, because he thought “ the earl was the fittest 
person to do good to the state,” a very likely and pro¬ 
bable reason to impose on an elderly lady, but hardly 
likely to deceive any more discriminative person. Could 
the keen and sagacious Bacon, a statesman, a courtier, a 
lawyer, now in his thirty-third year, really believe that the 
pampered boy Essex, twenty-five years of age, was more 
fitted than Burleigh to guide the helm of the state—Bur¬ 
leigh, the wisest minister of his time, whose counsels had 
brought the land through all her dangers for forty years ? 
Credat Judaeus. The two Bacons became the Earl’s 
feudatories, and do him homage and service, and he 
shall be their liege lord. They have both been disap¬ 
pointed, and found Burleigh’s place and pay unprofitable. 
Francis is without promotion at thirty-one, Anthony 
without requital even for the money he has spent. Essex 


66 


FRIENDSHIP FOUNDED ON INTEREST. 


is favourite. His star is in the ascendant: Raleigh, early 
in 1592, loses fame. These young politicians know how 
Leicester’s and Hatton’s stars went up on the strength of 
a good person, and they have seen Essex already drive 
out Raleigh. The Queen is but a woman. Qu’elle est 
moins folle que les autres: car toutes en tiennant de la 
folie.* Essex is young ; Burleigh is old. The star of the 
one ascends, the other’s light wanes. The veteran states¬ 
man has even been heard to complain of her Majesty’s 
treatment of him for the sake of that rash, ill-advised boy. 
What say the courtiers and the wits about town ? They 
say that Essex, the popular idol, will supplant the testy 
old Lord Treasurer—that Burleigh is old, and, in the 
course of nature, will not live long. Young Robert Cecil 
is no man to wear his father’s shoes, and he moreover 
loves not his cousin, and is jealous of Francis. So the 
lawyer of thirty-two and the politician of thirty-five, keen 
diplomatists both, trained in a good school, throw in with 
Essex. Essex is liberality itself personified. Timon’s 
self is not more bountiful. He needs older heads : then 
let Francis go into the best market. 

Francis did go into the best market. Essex and Francis 
Bacon became friends; first, lord and feudatory, then client 
and patron, afterwards intimates. Anthony becomes an 
inmate of Essex House, a home, no doubt, more comfort¬ 
able than his poor lodgings in Gray’s Inn, and henceforth 
we must trace the stars of Essex and Francis in conjunc¬ 
tion, as they choose their precipitous path up through the 
heaven of politics, high destiny, and great affairs. 


* Standen to Bacon, 1591. 


Essex’s introduction to the queen. 


67 


CHAPTER V. 

Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was the son of 
Walter Devereux, first Earl, who died in 1576, in the 
Queen’s service in Ireland. Two years after her husband’s 
death his mother married again, to Robert Dudley, Earl 
of Leicester, the favourite of the Queen. 

Spite of the dark nature imputed to Robert Dudley by 
his contemporaries, his unpopularity, the charges made 
against him of poisoning all whom he had an interest or 
malice to injure, he seems to have been a kind and affec¬ 
tionate husband. 

Notwithstanding the boy Robert’s natural dislike to his 
father-in-law, the great Earl stood honestly in place of a 
father to him. In the year fifteen hundred and eighty-five, 
being then eighteen years of age, he served his first cam¬ 
paign as general of the horse and field marshal, under 
Leicester, in the Low Countries. Two years after his general 
introduced him to his Queen. Whether owing to his early 
natural grace of manner, unusual generosity of temper, bold¬ 
ness and promptitude, or the Earl’s recommendation skil¬ 
fully tempered, her Majesty at once took him into her 
favour—a fact the more singular that he was neither of 


68 


CAREER OF ROBERT DEYEREUX. 


a fine person nor of a handsome face, having only very ex¬ 
pressive eyes and small and delicate hands to recommend 
him. He was a tall, slender lad; eager and energetic ; 
walking with his head forward ; ever in a hurry; full of 
animal spirits; bold and outspoken, carrying alike his 
loves and his hatred bare upon his forehead. Between 
him and Elizabeth there was a tinge of kinship, but not 
such as was likely to benefit him, for Elizabeth hated his 
mother Lettice Knollys, and so was hardly likely to lore her 
son. That his kinship subsequently furthered her love 
for him there can, however, be little doubt. Finding him 
bold, ready, and free from guile, a contrast to the courtiers 
about her, she took him at once into favour and, in 1588, 
at the great camp at Tilbury, before the assembled 
armies of England, graced him above his father-in-law, as 
was ever her way with a new favourite, and made him a 
knight of the garter. In fifteen hundred and eighty-nine, 
being bent on adventure, he departed with Drake’s 
expedition to Portugal, equipping several ships at his own 
charge. Two years after he was commissioned by the 
Queen to assist Henry IV. of France with four thousand 
men. Intermediately he had married Frances, the daughter 
of the great Sir Francis Walsingham, and the widow of 
Sir Philip Sidney. This marriage, unquestionably, 
injured his cause with Elizabeth, who expressed herself 
much incensed with his conduct, at a marriage so much 
below his station ; but he has again received favour, and 
is now the mould of fashion and of form, the courtiers’, 
soldiers’, scholars’, eye, tongue, sword; the expectancy and 
rose of the fair state, &c., and the royal favourite. 

In Feb. 1592, Anthony Bacon returned to London, as 


ANTHONY INTRODUCES ESSEX TO THE CATHOLICS. 69 


we have seen. In October we find proof in a letter written 
by Standen, his Catholic correspondent abroad, that Essex 
and Anthony Bacon are friends, that the Earl has already 
heaped favours upon Anthony. Standen’s letter is in answer 
to one from Anthony, and thus alludes to the subject:— 

“ To return to the noble earl you are so worthily 
esteemed of, Essex. It seems that, for the remedy of all, 
God hath reserved unto him the means, not only to serve 
his prince and to do good unto his country, hut also to 
bind unto him all the Catholics of Christendom; I mean 
if he would by your advice enter substantially into the 
matter of toleration for the Catholics at home, which, for 
the reasons I have in my former alleged, is so needful. 
All such priests as should deal in matters of state, I would 
have them punished without mercy. Such as simply, and 
without any ill intentions, went about catechizing and mi¬ 
nistering of the sacraments should not any way be vexed.” 

Here, then, if the Earl of Essex is driven into com¬ 
plicity with the Catholics, here is its beginning. Here we 
see the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that is to 
breed the thunderstorm, as, say some, the Gunpowder Plot. 
A recent author affirms the Essex plot to have been a 
Popish plot. If it were so, Anthony Bacon was the first 
mover in Catholic matters; and we have that “ active- 
witted but slow-footed ” man to thank for the first move. 
But the fact is, no more erroneous supposition could be put 
forth. Catholics, of course, engaged in it. They were 
ill-treated and persecuted. They were harassed in purse 
and person. It was natural that they should rebel. A 
Catholic of that day might probably have been secured 
in aid of any dangerous enterprise. Spain and the 


70 bacon’s reply to the libel on the cecils. 


Catholic countries, encouraged every disaffection and 
rebellion in their co-religionists, that could weaken the 
Protestant cause, (or England, the stay of that cause) 
throughout Europe. 

The Earl, however, lived, and remained and died a 
Puritan. Like his father-in-law, Leicester, he, from the 
first, favoured that body. But he was also tolerant in 
religion to the last. His dying words were to this effect. 
That he had and would persecute none for religion's sake ; 
but a Catholic he never had been. 

But though Bacon and his brother engage with the Earl, 
Francis Bacon is not one of those who would greatly win. 
He fears to break with his uncle. He will try both sides. 
And we find him in this year, or early in the next, 
writing a long article in answer to a pamphlet issued by 
Father Parsons, a Jesuit, attacking the government of 
Elizabeth, but particularly directed against the two Cecils, 
father and son. 

In this pamphlet Francis Bacon supplies a character 
of his beloved cousin Sir Robert Cecil. Among the 
correspondence, there exists an estimate made after his 
death of the same person. They are printed together, 
in order that the discrepancy between a portrait from 
the life and a post-mortem representation may be seen. 
Either one is surely too candid, or the other too kind. 

PORTRAIT OF SIR ROBERT CECIL, AFTERWARDS EARL OF 
SALISBURY, BY HIS COUSIN, FRANCIS BACON. 

“ For it is confessed by all men that know the gentleman 
Sir Robert Cecil, that he hath one of the rarest and most 
excellent wits of England, with a singular delivery and 


THE TWO PORTRAITS. 


71 


application of the same; whether it be to use a continued 
speech, or to negotiate, or to touch in writing, or to make 
a report, or discreetly to consider of the circumstances, 
and aptly to draw things to a point; and all this joined 
with a very good nature, and a great respect to all men, 
as is daily more and more revealed. . . . Not his father 
only, but the state is bound unto her Majesty, for the 
choice and employment of so sufficient and worthy a 
gentleman.” 

PORTRAIT BY THE SAME HAND OF THE SAME PERSON 
AFTER DEATH BUT BEFORE BURIAL. 

“ Your Majesty hath lost a great subject and a great 
servant. But if I should praise him in propriety, I should 
say that he was a fit man to keep things from growing 
worse, but no very fit man to reduce things to be much 
better. For he loved to have the eyes of all Israel a 
little too much on himself, and to have all business still 
under the hammer, and like clay in the hands of the 
potter, to mould it as he thought good; so that he was 
more in operatione than in opere ,” &c.* 

“ He is gone from whom these courses did wholly flow. 
So have your wants and necessities in particular, as it 
were, hanged up in two tablets before the eyes of your 
Lords and Commons, to be talked of for months together; 
to have all your courses to help yourself in revenue or 
profit put into printed books, which were wont to be held 
arcana imperii; to have such worms of aldermen to lend 
fourteen in the hundred upon good assurance, and with 

* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 281. Letter to the King immediately after 
Robert Cecil’s death.. 


72 


ealeigh’s expedition. 


such .... as if it should save the bark of your fortune ; 
to contract still where might be had the readiest payment, 
and not the best bargain; to stir a number of projects for 
your profit and then to blast them, and leave your Majesty 
nothing but the scandal of them ; to pretend an even car¬ 
riage between your Majesty’s rights and the ease of the 
people, and to satisfy neither ;—these courses, and others 
the like, I hope are gone -with the deviser of them, which 
have turned your Majesty to inestimable prejudice.”* 

During this year, 1592, Baleigh is full of adventure, 
plans an expedition to Panama to suppress the Spaniard 
and seize his ships, but is thwarted. His little fleet is 
dispersed by a tempest, and his fly-boats drowned, and 
the news at last arrives that no ships had gone from Spain. 
All of which determines him to divide his fleet, and place 
half under command of Frobisher and half under com¬ 
mand of Sir John Burrough, and send them, one to coast 
the Spanish seaboard, and the other the Azores, to stop 
the vessels returning from the East Indies. Burrough 
has luck, for while the Spanish admiral is engaged watch¬ 
ing Martin Frobisher on the coast, Burrough falls in with 
a convoy of carracks richly laden, and takes spoil valued 
at 150,000/. This summer there is a great drought, and 
the Queen, in her progress, visits Oxford. 

We come now to the year 1593, which is once more to 
open a chance for the briefless barrister, Francis Bacon. 
He is still engaged working half the night (and sleeping 
half the day), on all kinds of experiments; writing an 
answer to Parsons’ libel, penning political works, making 
ijotes for future histories. Pursuing his experiments. 

* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 283. See also letter of September 18th. 


BACON IN DEBT AND DANGER. 


73 


Thinking out his vast scheme of philosophy, and engaged 
in a hopeless struggle with his more and more involved 
financial position. So it has often, almost ever been, the 
mighty genius has to descend from its elevation to bargain 
and traffic about trifles—Defoe to sell hose; Shakspere 
to huckster for pit prices ; Newton to arrange the details 
of coining money; Bacon to scheme petty devices to 
stave oft’ his duns and the ever-encroaching Jews. In 
the month of April, this very month that parliament 
opens, things were grown to a climax. 

Anthony Bacon went down, in June or July of last year, 
to his mother at Gorhambury, leaving Francis solitary in 
his chambers at Gray’s Inn. In February he returned. 
On the 16th of April, Anthony writes to his mother on 
behalf of Francis, to remind her of a promise she had 
made to part with some portion of her estate for his 
benefit—to remind her not only out of tenderness to the 
health of his brother, “ which depends, as I know by 
experience, not a little upon a free mind, but likewise 
to his credit, since he would otherwise be obliged to 
forfeit the reversion which had been granted to him 
of the Star Chambership (the gift of Burleigh), or to 
undersell it very much, to the avoiding of all which great 
inconveniences I see no other remedy than your lady¬ 
ship’s surrender in time.” Concluding by avowing this 
was done by his own motion and not with his brother’s 
knowledge, a harmless fiction doubtless, but sufficient to 
deceive a fond mother. 

Parliament had met in the month of February. On 
the 24th Mr. Peter Wentworth and Sir Richard 
Bromley deliver a petition to the Lord Keeper, pray- 

E 


74 


EEFORM OF THE LAW. 


ing the Lords to join the Commons in a supplication 
to the Queen to entail the succession of the crown; 
for which piece of audacity the two gentlemen are on 
Sunday the 25th—so urgent is the Royal anger — 
called before the Lord Treasurer, and the same day com¬ 
mitted to the Tower to repent their patriotic zeal to see 
her majesty married. The following day we find Francis 
Bacon named on a committee with Yelverton, Sir Francis 
Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Edward Hoby, Bacon’s 
cousin, and several other gentlemen, to make report 
touching the returns of knights and burgesses to par¬ 
liament. On the same day he speaks, following Sir 
Robert Cecil, for a subsidy to the Queen, and his speech 
contains the following passage, not relating to the matter 
in hand, but which is the only part reported ; probably 
because in the rest of his argument he went over the 
same ground as the previous speakers. 

He has been brooding, in the silence of his chambers, over 
the state of the law. He thinks it needs reform ; nay, who 
so fit to reform it as himself? He has little or no practice 
at the bar. He has vast contemplative ends. He is a 
man of mark in the house. Can it be doubted that his 
ambition vaguely shapes itself into the hope that he may 
yet be permitted to be the Ulpian of his age ? 

“ The cause of assembling all parliaments hath been 
hitherto for Laws or Moneys—the one being the sinews 
of peace, the other of war. To the one I am not privy, 
but the other I should know. I did take great content¬ 
ment in her Majesty’s speeches the other day delivered by 
the Lord Keeper; how that it was a thing not to be done 
suddenly, nor at one parliament, nor scarce a whole year 



ECCLESIASTICAL OPPEESSION. 


75 


would suffice to purge the statute book, and lessen the 
volume of laws, being so many in number, that neither 
common people can practise them, nor the Lawyer suffi¬ 
ciently understand them, than the which nothing should 
tend more to the praise of her Majesty.” 

This is not very practical, and is marked by Bacon’s 
characteristic vagueness and incertitude of style. The next 
passage is more to the purpose. 

“ The Romans appointed ten men, who were to correct 
and recal all former Laws, and to set forth those Twelve 
Tables so much of all men to be commended.” Bacon’s 
knowledge of history is not accurate, or he misses 
the precise example and precedent which he needs in 
Justinian, while dealing with the twelve tables. “ The 
Athenians likewise appointed six for that purpose. And 
Lewis IX., King of France, did the like in reforming his 
Laws here the reporter breaks off abruptly. The com¬ 
mittee, however, is appointed to consider the subsidies, 
and not to concern itself with the reform of the law ; and 
this speech, so far as we know, fell still-born on the 
House. The subsidy committee includes Mr. Christopher 
Blount, who is to fall by the Essex House Plot, Mr. Fuller, 
Mr. Nathaniel Bacon, half-brother to Francis, and the 
second son of his father by his first wife, and Sir Walter 
Raleigh among its names. 

At this time the persecution of the Established Church 
against the Catholics has grown to a serious head, and is 
exciting murmurs within and without. The bishops and 
ordinaries exercise almost uncontrolled power for the 
persecution of their neighbours in ecclesiastical affairs, 
* D’Ewes, 473. 

E 2 


76 


THE PATRIOT OLIVER ST. JOHN. 


and the power to burn heretics, by the writ “ De Com- 
burendo,” still exists. So, on Tuesday, Feb. 27th, Mr. 
Morris, attorney t)f the Court of Wards, rises to plead 
against “ the hard courses of the bishops, and ordinaries, 
and the ecclesiastical judges in their courts,” having com¬ 
pelled innocent people to accuse themselves on their own 
oaths, because they know not to what questions they shall 
answer till after the time they be sworn. That they, 
moreover, imprison the subject, deprive him of his goods, 
or otherwise injure him, upon his own accusation. Mr. 
Dalton stands up, in reply, for ecclesiastical government 
Sir Francis Knolles thinks the bill a good bill, and fit to 
be read, as tending to reform abuses and to restrain the 
prelates, but not as injuring any member of the state. 
Dr. Lewen, a civilian, answers Mr. Morris historically 
and at length, by metaphor and trope. He holds inqui¬ 
sition to be lawful, because it had been long used and 
allowed by the greatest monarchs; for although a man 
accused was punished, yet, if the accuser failed in proof, 
he was punishable too; or the accused, if the accuser 
failed in his proof, might, by producing two witnesses, be 
acquitted. Subscription, that is, compulsory adhesion to 
a certain fixed oath, was used at Geneva, and was thus 
allowable here. Moreover it was good by statute. Mr. 
Henry Finch followed on the same side. Then follows 
young Mr. Oliver St. John, whom, nearly twenty years 
after, we shall find Bacon pleading against. As, in 1615, 
we find him on the side of liberty against oppression. 

Mr. St. John *—It is customary for the House, after 
the wisest, to allow and hear the meanest. He is yet 
* Condensed for brevity. 


THE BOLD STROKE FOR A PLACE. 


77 


young; but he will show them matter which is old. In 
answer to Mr. Lewen he will plead the statute, Nullus 
liber homo * That no free man is to be disseised of his 
tenure ; which is flatly violated by bishops’ jurisdiction. 
The bishops are trying the courses of Thomas a Becket. 
If antiquity or prescription is justification, the thieves may 
take purses on Shooters’ Hill because time out of hand 
they had done so. And as for the trial by inquisition it 
is not so old as that by accusation, for the Saviour first 
asked against the adulterous woman who were her 
accusers. And as to enforced subscription to an oath, 
that was not intended by the statute, but a subscription 
to certain articles in religion. And because it is allowed 
in Geneva is no reason it should be allowed here. In 
Geneva many things are allowed which the person pro¬ 
posing their example would be loth to follow. 

Sir Robert Cecil hereupon spoke, asking the bill to be 
delayed. And after him rises the Speaker, Sir E. Coke, 
asking to be allowed to retain the bill, “ which he will 
keep with all secrecy till he has read it, which he has had 
no opportunity to do. At two o’clock in the afternoon 
the Queen, being apprised by Cecil of the bill, sent for 
Coke, and ordered no further attention in the matter. 
Here is Coke’s statement to the House. After detail¬ 
ing his attendance on her Majesty’s command, “that 
it was the queen’s pleasure the House should not meddle 
with things ecclesiastical, and that no bill touching such 
matters be exhibited; and I am commanded,” adds the 
Speaker, “ if any such bill be exhibited, on my allegiance 
not to read it.” On Friday, March 2nd, Cecil again 

* The 29th cap. of Magna Charta, made such good use of by Coke 
after, and the foundation of Habeas Corpus. 


78 


ITS FAILURE. 


brings forward the question of a subsidy to the queen, as 
usual Mr. Francis Bacon following. In all the parliaments 
in which he has sat, we have seen him make no speech on 
the side of liberty or of freedom, nor on any subject of 
general policy, save and except the one referring to a 
codification of the laws ; but he has always followed, like 
an echo, Sir Robert Cecil. 

He yields to the subsidy, but objects (mislikes) that 
the lower should join with the upper house in granting 
it. “ For the custom and privilege of this house hath 
always been first to make offer of the subsidies from hence. 
And reason it is that we should stand upon our privilege, 
seeing the burthen resteth upon us as the greatest number ; 
nor is it reason the thanks should be theirs. And if we 
join with them the thanks will be theirs, the blame ours, 
they being the first moversconcluding by suggesting 
that they shall sit apart in the matter, as heretofore, 
drawing out of his bosom an answer, prepared for the 
occasion, to be sent to the Lords. 

Here is Bacon in a new aspect. No longer the tool of 
the Cecils, no longer tied by all duties, both of a good 
patriot and of an unworthy kinsman and an obliged 
servant,” to do them service. Is the stroke Essex’s or 
Anthony’s ? It is not his own, surely. 

The house “ approved the said Mr. Bacon’s opinion.” 
As indeed it well might, his speech being bold and manly, 
well founded in law as to precedent, and an out-spoken 
declaration of the privilege of parliament. On the 7th he 
speaks again. Mr. Francis Bacon assented to three sub¬ 
sidies, but not to the payments under six years, for three 
reasons : the difficulty; the danger and discontent; and, 
thirdly, the better means of supply than subsidy. 


THE HUMILIATION. 


79 


“ 1. The impossibility or difficulty. The poor man's rent 
is such, that he cannot pay so much for the present. The 
gentlemen must sell their plate, and farmers their brass 
pots, ere this will be paid. And for us, we are here to 
search the wounds of the realm, and not to skim them 
over; therefore we are not to persuade ourselves that the 
people’s wealth is greater than it is.” 

“ 2. The danger and discontent; because, in putting two 
subsidies into one, we make a double subsidy. For it 
maketh four shillings in the pound—a double payment. 
So we shall put an evil precedent upon posterity. And in 
history it is to be observed that the English are not to be 
subject base or taxable.” 

From this time, parliament sits busily till the 10th of 
April; the reports growing more voluminous now in 
D’Ewes. We search in vain through many pages, 
full of speeches of different members, but there is no 
mention of Mr. Francis Bacon again appearing in affairs 
of state, this session. His name occurs in several places 
in connection with the Star Chamber, on account of his 
reversion; as one of the privy council of the house to 
stop inquiry into abuses, and as a member of different 
committees; but he is silent on the subsidies when they 
are next proposed. Questions of law as to designation 
of facts, of subsidy, concerning individuals, and general 
policy, but he is silent on all. It is, to say the least, 
singular. For an explanation we must seek elsewhere. 

This speech gave great offence to her Majesty, who was 
most tenacious about her privileges, and of a temper not 
to be thwarted in anything. Two members were committed 
to the Tower this session, for suggesting that public policy 


80 


THE HUMBLE APOLOGY. 


requires her marriage, as we have seen; and Morris is 
now in custody, and suing to Burleigh for enlargement. 
He talks of that traitor ; and it is well for Francis Bacon 
if he does not get sent after them. Under such a system 
of terrorism do members of parliament work. The Queen’s 
offence he is apprised of by the younger Cecil. Whether 
that wily minister first brought Bacon’s remarks to her 
notice cannot now be known. He is no friend to his 
cousin. He is cunning and withal dangerous and im¬ 
placable, cold and insincere. In an interview a few days 
after with the old Lord Treasurer, who grows old and 
testy, and is now wifeless/ Bacon is told how much 
offence he has given; and, perchance, recommended to 
write a letter expressing his contrition and error, which, 
it is much to be regretted, he did; whether of his own 
will, or on a hint of the Lord Treasurer, mattering little. 

FRANCIS bacon’s LETTER TO THE LORD TREASURER 

BURLEIGH, IN APOLOGY FOR BEATING THE GOVERN¬ 
MENT. 

“ It may please your Lordship, 

“I was sorry to find, by your lordship’s speech 
yesterday, that my last speech in parliament, in discharge 
of my conscience and duty to God, her Majesty, and my 
country, was offensive. If it were misreported, I would 
be glad to attend your lordship, to disavow anything I said 
not. If it were misconstrued, I would be glad to expound 
myself, to exclude any sense I meant not. If my heart 
be misjudged, by imputation of popularity or opposition, 
by any envious or officious informer, I have great wrong; 
and the greater because the manner of my speech did 
most evidently show that I spake simply, and only to 
satisfy my conscience, and not with any advantage or 
* Lady Burleigh died April, 1589. 


A CONTRAST WITH COURAGE. 


81 


policy to sway the cause; and my terms carried all signi¬ 
fication of duty and zeal towards her Majesty and her 
service. It is true that from the beginning whatsoever was 
above a double subsidy I did wish might, for precedent’s 
sake, appear to be extraordinary, and for discontent’s sake 
might not have been levied upon the poorer sort; though 
otherwise I wished it as rising as I think this will prove, 
and more. This was my mind ; I confess it. And there¬ 
fore I most humbly pray your good lordship, first, to con¬ 
tinue me in your own good opinion, and then to perform 
the part of an honourable friend towards your poor servant 
and alliance, in drawing her Majesty to accept of the 
sincerity and simplicity of my zeal, and to hold me in her 
Majesty’s favour, which is to me dearer than my life, and 
so, etc. 

“ Your Lordship’s most humble in all duty, 

“ Fr. Bacon.” 

This, it must be confessed, is not brave language. At 
least for a man who has beaten the government by a 
majority of 217 to 128. Yet, bating the last, it is just. 
That he wishes the subsidy as much (as rising, as I 
think this will prove), having taken the most effectual 
means to hinder it, by declaring the double assessment 
of four shillings in the pound too much, is not so clear. 
It may be said—it has been said —in justification of 
Bacon’s letters to persons in power generally, that they 
were only in consonance with the tone of expression of the 
age. There is, singularly, a letter extant, from one of 
the two prisoners committed to the Tower, written in this 
very month * to Lord Keeper Burleigh. He is an older 
man, a lawyer, a recorder of Chelmsford, and it is in 
similar suit to Bacon’s; but under much more urgent 

* Lodge, vol. ii., p. 445, March 1st, 1592. 

E 3 


82 BROKEN HEALTH BUT UNBROKEN SPIRIT. 


circumstances. It is from a prisoner. His age, his chance 
of promotion, his family, are hindrances, if any, to his in¬ 
dependence. Here are two extracts from his letter:— 


“ I see no cause in my conscience to repent me of that 
I have done, nor to be dismayed, although grieved by 
this my restraint of liberty, for I stand for the main¬ 
tenance of God and my prince, and for the preservation 
of public justice, and the liberties of my country against 
wrong and oppression, being well content at her Majesty’s 
good pleasure and commandment to suffer and abide 
much more. 

“ Pardon my plain speech, I humbly beseech your 
honour, for it proceedeth from an upright heart and sound 
conscience, although in a weak and sickly body ; and by 
God’s grace, while life doth last, which I hope now, after 
so many cracks and crazes, will not be long, I will not be 
ashamed, in good and lawful suit, to strive for the freedom of 
conscience, public justice, and the liberties of my country. 

“ Her Majesty’s humble prisoner, 

“ Your Lordship’s most bounden, 

“ James Morice.” * 


Here is a public servant, in imminent danger of confis¬ 
cation of all his large estates, of reduction to beggary, of 
imprisonment with what fatal result he knows not, in bad 
and broken health—he dies prematurely at forty-eight- 
writing on similar grounds ; but every impartial reader 
must feel in a very different strain. But Francis Bacon is 
determined to rise. The world is his oyster, which he, with 
his wits, will open. He is a courtier. As one of that class, 
he is prepared to crawl; more than is consistent with dignity. 

Lord Macaulay thinks in the speech which necessitated 


* This letter, signed “ Morice,” is only an instance of the arbitrary 
mode of spelling in Elizabeth’s day. I have adopted the modern 
spelling, as he was generally spoken of as Morris. 


THE QUEEN’S ANGER. 


83 


this letter he aimed at popularity, or rather that it was part 
of a systematic attempt to gain popularity. But there is no 
evidence of this. His previous language in the same ses¬ 
sion on other matters is in consistence with his pledges of 
fealty to Burleigh. His reliance on his lordship has been 
shaken by his own conduct. But he still hopes against 
hope, by pliancy to win the Queen’s favour. Anthony is 
drawing the bonds tighter between himself and Essex, 
and would wish Francis to do the same. It is certainly 
not impossible that Essex and Anthony may have had some 
part in this attack on government. Not that it requires 
such an explanation of motives. Bacon may have con¬ 
scientiously believed the Subsidy excessive. He did not 
think the consequences of opposing it would be so severe.- 
Nay, he may have seen evil in the act, and out of his 
generous and feeling heart—for he has a nature promptly 
sympathetic to pain and suffering in others—have be¬ 
lieved much misery will result. Yet such a theory would 
be very barely consistent with his character. More pro¬ 
bably it is an ebullition of temper—an attack on the 
Cecils. Yet the Queen is greatly incensed, and if that 
was the motive the stroke has failed. On the 16th of 
April, Anthony writes to his mother that the Earl of Essex 
had been twice very earnest with her Majesty concerning 
his brother Francis, “ whose speech being well grounded, 
and directed to good ends, I doubt not but God in his 
mercy will in time make it an occasion of her Majesty’s 
better opinion and liking.” 

Of the Earl of Essex’s further labouring in the. cause of 
his young friend, we find a letter, written in the same 
month of April by Bacon, containing this passage : “ The 
care whereof, touching mine own fortune, in your lordship, 


84 THE TIE WITH ESSEX STRENGTHENED. 

* 

as it is no news to me, so nevertheless the main effects 
and demonstrations past are so far from dulling in me the 
sense of any new, as contrariwise every new (favour) 
refresheth the memory of many past.”* The rest of the 
letter is equally involved in style, but states that he will 
not dispose of himself without Essex’s allowance, because 
it is well to be advised by a friend, and because “ my 
affection to your lordship hath made mine own content¬ 
ment inseparable from your satisfaction.” 

Here at least is some indication of Francis Bacon’s 
playing fast and loose. The Cecils and Essex are foes in 
politics, yet the young adventurer writes “ That I will 
not dispose of myself without your allowance.” In June, 
Anthony Bacon introduces Stan den to Essex. Standen 
has been exiled for his religious or political opinions, or 
both. He is' an admirable political agent, well versed in 
continental politics, and is thp guest of the Bacons, in 
Gray’s Inn.f The Earl has been apprised of his political 
value; and as he, young as he is, fights with the Cecils 
for power in the realm, he has at Anthony Bacon’s 
instance procured the remission of his banishment and a 
permission to return. Even before he arrives, the Earl 
writes to be apprised of his coming, when he will call at 
Gray’s Inn, secretly to have an interview with him in 
presence of Anthony Bacon. The two brothers are in 
all things ready to serve their generous patron who is in 
power. They have abilities and capacities that cannot be 
thrust down, and will make themselves useful, and, if 
possible, necessary, to the young favourite. Standen bids 
for Lord Burleigh’s service, but is slighted. Essex is in¬ 
duced by the Bacons to adopt him. On the 4th of July he 

* Birch, ‘ Mem. of Queen Eliz., vol. i, p. 97. f Ibid. vol. i., p. 113. 


THE NATURE OF AFFINITY. 


85 


writes, being still with the Bacons, thanking the earl for his 
gracious intercession with her Majesty on his behalf, “ I 
am now entered into entertainment fattura di V. S. 
illustrissima On the 18th of July, Anthony and Francis 
Bacon are at Twickenham ; and Anthony writes thence to 
his brother : “ That their honourable and most kind friend 
the Earl of Essex had been there, at Twickenham, the 
day before, for three hours, and most friendlily and freelily 
promised to set up his whole rest of favour and credit for 
Mr. Francis Bacon’s preferment before Mr. Edward 
Coke, whenever the Attorney-General Egerton should be 
removed to the Bolls. His lordship told me likewise 
that he had already moved the Queen for my brother, and 
that she took no exception to him, but said that she must 
first despatch the French and Scots ambassadors, and her 
business abroad, before she thinketh of home matters.” 

In this passage we have the first intimation now 
existing, that Bacon was anxious to obtain the office of 
Attorney-General—that he hoped to gain it through 
Essex’s intervention—and that the Earl’s agency was 
looked on as a special mark of favour and kindness. 

Two or three errors of opinion have long existed as to 
the connection between Bacon and the Earl of Essex. 
They have been spoken of as mutual friends. They have 
been declared lord and servant, as the wish has prevailed 
to ascribe Essex’s generosity to benevolence or mere 
selfishness. At first they were neither. The tie was 
of patron and client. Anthony Bacon, from his first 
return to England, enters into the service, as an ama¬ 
teur or volunteer,, of the Earl of Essex. The Earl has 
wealth, station, and power. Anthony Bacon has his own. 
good wit. They may be useful to each other They 


86 


THE FIKST STKIFE WITH COKE. 


make a friendship, which is one of the strongest kind, 
being founded on mutual advantage. Francis is no active 
partner in this concern, but he is to share the profit. He 
is still briefless, an unsuccessful lawyer, more given to 
philosophy than jurisprudence. Whose tastes, as he has 
more than once emphatically declared, lie nearer science and 
literature than law. His knowledge as a jurisconsult broad 
and philosophic, is not the knowledge of daily practice. 
For every case he can cite from the statutes and the year¬ 
book, Coke could give a thousand. He is no man for the 
attorneys. He sleeps while the men plod at West¬ 
minster Hall. He works while they sleep, on mighty 
schemes of universal reform, which shall dwarf their little 
labours to mole-hills beside the mighty pyramid he is 
building up to his eternal fame. What of that ? Bacon 
is given to contemplative ends, and is not qualified for 
office. Yet Essex will not have it so. He appreciates 
the genius, of the struggling philosopher. He believes, 
and believes truly, that a man so wise, so great in intellect, 
will not fail in any intellectual exertion. 

The Earl has no great knowledge of law, but he knows 
Bacon. He believes, doubtless, he will honour any station. 
At any rate he is an enthusiast, who does nothing by halves. 
He loves or hates with equal impetuosity and vehemence. 
Bacon he admires, and will serve. He will try and help 
him to the attorney’s place. Francis Bacon has done 
nothing for him, never served him. The generosity is pure 
on his patron’s part. He knows that Bacon is wasting away 
miserably a noble life in chambers; pining ingloriously in 
obscurity; a prey to that hope deferred which is said to 
make the heart sick. For the first time in his life, a 
powerful and friendly hand is held out to Francis Bacon. 


THE RESPECTIVE CLAIMS. 


87 


lie is nearly thirty-three. He is likely to live in this 
hateful inactivity to the end of his days, unnoticed and 
unknown. Let us consider he was precociously wise, yet 
up to this time he has done nothing, literally and absolutely 
nothing, to distinguish himself publicly. So soon to blow, 
his genius is yet so late to produce fruit. 

His defence of Burleigh, now published, is poor in every 
sense. It is not acute ; it is not vigorous ; it is not worldly. 
He has not found the right vein. His 4 Greatest Birth of 
Time ’ was still-born. In the best school of practice he 
has had little culture. Men cannot become lawyers by 
mere reading, much less can they do so by divided atten¬ 
tion. Will, any person pretend to declare that Bacon is 
likely to obtain office as a lawyer ? That he ought to do 
so ? It is pardonable for his friends to try and place him. 
They know him best—much better than the world ;—what 
he can do, or may do, rather than what he has done. 
The world gives him repute only for what is passed to his 
account in the great ledger. There his name stands, 
with nothing to his credit. 

Yet all historians and biographers seem to think that 
he was neglected and ill-used by Elizabeth, kept down by 
his relatives, or marred by Essex's interference. There is 
reason enough without any of these causes concurring. 
He is a competitor with Coke; yet Coke has been 
Speaker of the House of Commons, and is the best lawyer 
in Westminster Hall. Moreover, Coke is a man of 
known integrity. He has the largest practice of his day, 
but is not merely learned in practice. He knows more 
black-letter law, more of the books, than all the rest of 
the bar put together. Is it not reasonable to suppose that 
Coke, already honoured by the commons, the solicitor- 


COKE A GREAT LAWYER. 


general* an older man, nine years older, of infinite 
practice, and powerful where he is most required to be 
powerful as attorney-general, viz. as a lawyer, should be 
chosen ? Shall the Queen reject a great lawyer to take an 
untried man ? Shall she turn from the general opinion to 
special favoritism ? Coke’s practice proves his repute with 
lawyers. Bacon’s want of it no less proves • his. Even a 
father’s services cannot, nor ought not, to weigh against 
merit like that of Coke’s. So her Majesty pauses, even 
though Essex cajoles. No one thinks Bacon fit for the 
place but Essex, she declares. And at another time, 
“ Bacon strives to the utmost of his power in law, but in 
law he is not deep.” The Queen is too sagacious to do 
so unwise, so unjust a thing. To lift Bacon over Coke 
would be to expose herself to the calumny and slander as 
well as the just reprehension of the whole realm. She 
pauses out of love to Essex. She will not decide against 
him. But for fear of public opinion she will not decide for 
Bacon. A better opportunity may arise. 

Is it nothing to be a great lawyer ? Has Coke no claims 
to honour—to be dissatisfied at his tardy recognition ? Yet 
no one has considered him an injured man. He has wooed 
the Law alone. He has made her his sole mistress. If his 
fidelity is not to be rewarded, then indeed is he an injured, 
an ill-used man. So there is a pause. But Bacon will not 
be idle, and will leave no stone unturned to gain his end. 

Before pointing out the Earl’s and Bacon’s labours to 
make the latter Attorney over Coke’s head, we will proceed 
with the train of communication in the family circle of 
the two brothers. By the Earl’s intercession, Mr. Standen 
is permitted to have an interview with her Majesty, in 
* Coke was made solicitor-general in 1592. 


FEAR OF LADY BACON. 


89 


which he satisfies her so sufficiently of his loyalty, that 
she commands him to write an account of his adventures 
abroad for her perusal. Anthony Bacon also requests 
the Earl to sue to the Queen that Standen’s brother may 
be restored to the commission of the peace. Anthony 
Bacon, in return, busies himself in Essex’s service in 
obtaining and carrying further intelligence from abroad, 
and especially with Scotland. He remits Dr. Morison 
thirty pounds on account of intelligence received or to 
be gained in Scotch affairs, at present very precarious, in 
other w r ords, to act as spy upon the Scotch king. In 
August, Francis Bacon is at Windsor with the court, and 
Standen requests him to present his narrative of his 
travels to the Queen, which the wary and cautious Bacon, 
who will not permit himself to be mixed up with Catholics, 
takes care to avoid by indisposition. 

The Earl, as usual doing nothing by halves, writes a 
letter recommending Mr. Standen to another friend, a 
Mr. Weston, desiring his good opinion and favour for his 
sake, adding, “ w r hom it is needless I would desire 
you to love more for my sake.” Lady Bacon is not, 
how r ever, so favourably disposed; and such is the em¬ 
phatic temper of that pious and noble lady, that on her 
threat of appearance at Twickenham, where Standen and 
a friend are the guests of Anthony, they beat a hasty 
and ignominious retreat, as she will have no Catholics in 
her house, not she, perverting her sons. She has already 
cautioned them to beware of Papists and Jesuits, who go 
about to ensnare the godly ;* but young men are so 
heedless and so unsuspecting. Good, kind mamma! 

* See Standen’s letter. Antli. Bac. Correspondence. Lady Bacon’s 
letter, June 26. 


90 THE QUEEN STILL IMPLACABLE. 

From the day that Bacon spoke up against the double 
subsidy and heat the government, he has been out of 
favour with the Queen. While Anthony is at Twickenham, 
he has been six weeks or more hanging about Windsor, 
in hope of an interview with offended Majesty. Essex is 
pleading for him. Six months or more have elapsed : it 
is now the end of September ; yet his Mistress is implacable 
as ever. The Earl writes to Francis that he has attempted 
to mollify her—that he is constantly urging upon her 
Bacon’s restitution to her grace and princely favour. 

“ A day or two since I spoke to her,” said the Earl, “ as 
she was going in to her supper, who cut me short, being 
but just arrived,” and probably very hungry. “ Yesterday, 
however, I had a full audience, but with little better 
success. The points I pressed were an absolute am¬ 
nesty, and an access as in former times. Against the 
first, she pleaded you were more in fault than any of the 
rest in parliament ; and when she did forgive it, and 
manifest her receiving of them into favour, that offended 
her then, she will do it to many, that were less in fault, 
as well as to yourself. Your access, she saith, is as much 
as you can look for. If it had been in the king, her 
father s, time a less offence than that would have made a 
man be banished his presence for ever. But you did 
come to the court, when you would yourself; and she 
should precipitate too much from being highly displeased 
with you, to give you near access, such as she shows only 
to those that she favours extraordinarily. I told her, 
what I sought for you was not so much for your good, 
though it were a thing I would seek extremely, and please 
myself in obtaining, as for her own honour, that those 
excellent translations of hers might be known to them 
who could best judge of them. Besides, my desire was 
that you should neither be stranger to her person nor her 
service ; the one for your own satisfaction, the other for 
her Majesty's own sake, who, if she did not employ you, 
should lose the use of the ablest gentleman to do her 
service of any of your quality whatsoever. Her humour 


Essex’s generosity. 


91 


is yet to delay. I am now going to her again ; and what 
I cannot effect at once I will look to do saepe cadendo . 
Excuse my ill writing. I write in haste and have my 
chamber full of company, that break my head with 
talking.” 

Poor, unhappy, generous young earl! So shall ye he re¬ 
quited. In eight years, nay, not so much, the man whom 
you now seek to serve will have his knife in your heart. 
He will strike home. Will turn and bite the hand that 
fed him. Will prove you to be Pisistratus. Will kick you 
aside, the ladder by which he rises. Yet worse, he will 
calumniate you dead, and while still enjoying the results 
of your munificence, for a sum of twelve hundred pounds 
he will prostitute his genius to the defamation of your 
memory. Alas ! alas ! so it often is : nothing will avail 
that man who is not his own best friend. 

On the 11th of September the Earl of Essex gives 
100£. to Morrison, Anthony Bacon’s agent in the Scotch 
capital—a proof that Anthony is working in Essex’s cause, 
and for his own and brother’s advancement. The day has 
not yet come for either, to turn upon the Earl and deny 
his favours; so Anthony writes the same day to his 
mother, with this passage in the letter— 

“ I cannot tell in what terms to acknowledge the desert 
of the Earl’s unspeakable kindness toward us both, but 
namely to him now at a pinch, which by God’s help shortly 
will appear, by good effects. Surely, madam, I must needs 
confess, beseeching God to give us the grace and means 
to be thankful therefore ; the Earl declareth himself more 
like a father than a friend unto him , and doubt not, but 
that if he should be first, do but second the earl, those 
gifts which God hath bestowed on my brother shall lie 


92 


BACON A GOOD FRIEND TO HIMSELF. 


no longer fallow.”* A few days after it may be presumed, 
for the letters do not bear the exact date, but the month 
only, the earl writes in answer to Mr. Francis Bacon:— 

“ Mr. Bacon,— t 

“ Your letter met me here yesterday. When I came, 
I found the Queen so wayward, as I thought it no fit time 
to deal with her in any sort, especially since her choler 
grew towards myself, which I have well satisfied this day, 
and will take the first opportunity I can to move your suit. 
And if you come hither, I pray you let me know still 
where you are. And so, being fulf of business, I must 
end, wishing you what you wish to yourself, 

“ Your assured Friend, 

“ Sept. 1593. Essex.” 

Was there ever such a friend ? Such a zealous, indefati¬ 
gable friend; so forgetful of self; so rash in running into 
danger for others ; so ready to provoke the Queen’s great 
anger ? But if the Earl is indefatigable for another, Bacon 
has at least the merit of being indefatigable for himself. 
He writes to Burleigh and Robert Cecil; indeed, he is a 
man not to be put off easily. Robert Cecil answers him at 
length in a letter too long to quote. It says reasonably, 
however, “ that it is not likely to find the Queen apt to 
give an office when the scruple is not removed of her for¬ 
bearance to speak with you.| Burleigh writes like a 
busy man and a Lord Treasurer on the same day. 

Nephew,— 

“ I have no leisure to write much; but for answer 
I have attempted to place you; but her Majesty hath 
required the Lord Keeper (Puckering) to give to her the 
names of divers lawyers to be preferred; wherewith he 
made me acquainted, and I did name you as a meet man, 

* Birch, * Memoirs, Eliz.’ vol. i., p. 122. f Montagu, vol. xiii., p. 13. 

X Montagu, voi. xiii., p. 73. Letter of September 27. 


THE LORD KEEPER’S ESTIMATE OF BACON. 93 

whom his lordship allowed, in way of friendship, for your 
father’s sake; but he made scruple to equal you with 
certain whom he named, as Brograve (attorney of the 
Duchy of Lancaster) and Branthwayt, whom he specially 
commendetli. But 1 will continue the remembrance of you 
to her Majesty, and implore my Lord of Essex’s help.” 

So, as far as we can see, there is no ground for the sus¬ 
picion of Macaulay, that the Burleighs thwarted Bacon 
intentionally, or bore him malice. In truth, there is no 
need. Bacon, in law, is his own enemy. He is no lawyer. 
Puckering, the Lore! Chancellor, has no opinion of him. 
Speaking to his neal kinsman, the great Lord Burleigh, 
he will not even admit the nephew’s claims. In the 
“ way of friendship” and “ for his father’s sake,” he might 
do. This is not flattering. A lawyer or an attorney- 
general, for his father’s sake, is no great recommendation. 
The ship will not steer better because a man is no pilot but 
the son of a pilot. Though pressed, the wise Lord Keeper 
and judge will not allow him to be equal to older and more 
practised lawyers. Why should he ? In brief, what is now 
termed emphatically “ a job,” is attempted. A man less 
bold than Bacon, less resolutely bent on his own 
advancement, would pause before he attempted to take 
the wall of older and better men. But he has no scruples. 
He is of the stuff to get on. He will rise in the end. 
Such a man cannot be denied, for perseverance of this 
mettle is better than “ patient merit ” which will take 
spurns of the unworthy. 

About this time, Francis Bacon also wrote to the Queen 
a bold, hardly a politic letter, scarcely even courteous, 
commencing “ Madam,” in which he declares he does that 
for her “ which I never would do for mine own gain he 
alleges that he only desires a place in his profession such 


94 


“ FIT FOR A SECOND PLACE.' 


as men of no great note in the profession, and younger in 
proceeding, “ without blame aspire to.” “ He is glad to 
find, like the Lacedsemonian, that there is such choice of 
abler men if her Majesty like another better. The con¬ 
clusion shall be that I wish your Majesty served answer- 
able to yourself. Principis est virtus maxima nosse 
suos.” A letter that should, like many others, have been 
printed at length if space admitted, for its boldness and 
manliness, not to say rashness, of which we shall have 
another instance by-and-by. 

On the 10th of October, Anthony sets out to see the 
Queen at Windsor, but is taken so ill at Eton as to be 
unable to proceed. On the 10th, he writes to his im¬ 
patient brother Francis : “ Yet if you will, and think it to 
the purpose, I mean to venture an extraordinary letter to 
the Earl, correspondent to the duty of a brother, and of a 
free devoted servant to his lordship, which I will be so 
bold as to beseech his lordship, having once read it, to 
burn in my man’s sight.” Anthony Bacon has written 
in his brother’s behalf to Essex. The Earl, on or about 
the 16th or 18th, writes in reply, he has been so ill that 
he has been compelled to keep his bed, where he has 
remained ever since, or he would have written before. 
“She was content to hear me plead at large for your 
brother, but condemned my judgment in thinking him 
fittest to be attorney, whom his own uncle did name fit to 
a second place , and said that the sole exception against 
Mr. Coke was stronger against your brother, which was 
youth. To the first I answered, thSt it was rather the 
humour of my lord to have a man obnoxious to him, and 
to the second that the comparison held not good, for if 
they were both of one standing, yet herself knew there 


MORRIS PUT FORWARD. 


95 


was such a difference in the worthiness of the persons, as 
if Mr. Coke’s head and beard were grown grey with age, 
it would not counterpoise his other disadvantages. . And 
yet Mr. Bacon was the ancient in standing by three or 
four years. Your offers and my mingling arguments of 
merit with arguments of affection, moved somewhat; but 
all had been too little if I had not a promise negative, 
and desired her, before she resolved upon any of them, 
to hear me again. So she referred me over till this 
day.” 

“ To-day I found her stiff in her opinion, that she would 
have her own way. Therefore, 1 grew more earnest than 
ever I did before, insomuch as she told me she would be 
advised by those that had more judgment in these things 
than myself. I replied, so she might be, and yet it would 
be more for her service to hear me than to hear them ; for 
my speech had truth and zeal to her without respect of 
private ends. If I failed in judgment to discern between 
the worth of one man and another, she would teach it me ; 
and it was not an ill rule for to hold him an honest and 
wise man whom many wise and honest men hold in reputa¬ 
tion. But those whom she trusted did leave out the wisest 
and worthiest, and did praise for affection. Whereupon, 
she bade me name any man of worth whom they had not 
named. I named Mr. Morris,f and gave him his due. She 
acknowledged his gifts, but said, his speaking against her 
in such a manner as he had done should be a bar against 
any preferment at her hands, but seemed to marvel that in 
their bill they had never thought of him. I told her that 

* Birch, ‘Memoirs of Eliz.,’ vol. i., p. 127. 

f This Mr. Morris was the recorder for Chelmsford, whom we have 
seen imprisoned. He has been released through the earl’s intercession. 


96 


THE STRATAGEM. 


I was a stranger to the law, and to almost all that pro¬ 
fessed it; but I was persuaded that there were many un¬ 
spoken of more worthy than those that had been conceded 
to her. To conclude this last stratagem hath moved their 
proceeding, which yet hath been as violently urged this 
day as ever was anything.’’ 

So this mention of Mr. Morris is “ a stratagem ” is it ? 
being out of favour, though not hateful to her Majesty, 
and therefore not likely to hinder Mr. Bacon. We see by 
this that Coke has no reason to like the Earl of Essex, and 
if he requite him by-and-by it shall be no wonder. But then 
Robert Devereux having done so much to serve Francis 
Bacon, this last will stand his friend. We shall see. There 
is here no mention of Bacon’s law, no attempt to show 
that he is fit for the place ; 44 he is well considered by the 
wise,” but this is very vague testimony : it is not said that 
he knows his profession, but that he has other qualifica¬ 
tions. The Earl as a young rash man will go further than 
Bacon’s own uncle for him ; and being ignorant of Coke’s 
transcendent merits will abuse him in the Queen’s ear. 
In this character of Coke he has taken his cue from 
Bacon. Sparing no arts, even the most unworthy, to 
gain his end, the place-hunter has already vilified Coke to 
Essex—speaks of him as the “ huddler.” Why the oppro¬ 
brious epithet is used, or wherein is its application, it is 
difficult to see. Perhaps Coke was not orderly in his 
business, yet no complaint has arisen to this point; per¬ 
haps it was only in reference to his rhetoric; and Coke, 
we know, was a huddler in this matter—tumbling out his 
barbarous law Latin, his proofs of holy writ, and his cases 
from the yearbooks, without order or method, but always 
to the point—always exhaustively. 


PROOFS AGAINST BACON. 


97 


By November the 1st, the news has got abroad in the 
inns of court that the Queen has given way to the Earl; 
that Bacon is to be attorney over Coke’s head; that 
Francis Bacon is to be made a public man at last. A 
friend, Robert Kemp, of Gray’s Inn, barrister-at-law, 
writes to congratulate him; and Bacon writes back to 
him in great spirits, on the 4th, very happily and plea¬ 
santly, and, so far as I know, the only friendly and warm 
epistle he ever wrote. It contains this passage to the point. 
“For my fortune (to speak correct) it is very slow, if any¬ 
thing can be slow to him that is secure in the event. I 
propose to remain till Michaelmas term, then to St. 
Albans, and after term to court.” So Bacon calculates 
on the certainty, and yet six days after, in a letter to the 
Earl, he writes :— 

“ I have some cause to think he ” (probably Puckering) 
“ worketh for the Huddler underhand. This I write to the 
end, and chiefly that your lordship be pleased to send 
again whether they have not amongst them drawn out the 
nail, which your lordship had driven in for the negative of 
the huddler,” concluding by asking his lordship to urge 
again, and a postscript to burn the letter, “ because it is 
not such, but the light showeth through.”* 

Mr. Standen delivered this letter. The original of which 
this is the copy, being “ read with more length and atten¬ 
tion than infinite others,” and immediately burned by the 
Earl in a candle. Yet even now, after the lapse of three 
hundred years, the crime rises in judgment against the 
criminal, spite of his wariness and cunning. 

We have traced this matter so far at length, and at 
* Montagu, vol. xi., p. 74. 

F 


98 


THE ADVISED PARTISANS. 


great risk of being tedious to the general reader, because 
the fame of Lord Bacon, justly or unjustly, is of that 
weight and importance that any hurried imputation, 
unenforced by proof, would be open to the heaviest charge 
of shame. I should not have entered on the uncongenial 
task of displaying fully the meanness of any man so truly 
despicable in his private actions, least of all of so great 
an intellectual benefactor, but for the injudicious and 
false assertions of a book recently published with the pre¬ 
tence of defending his fame, but really only with the 
intention of slandering and vilifying his contemporaries, 
and especially his noble friend Essex, and that great and 
distinguished lawyer, Sir Edward Coke. 

Had an honest justification of Bacon been aimed at, it 
could have been gained without slander. His honour 
might be honestly defended, if it could not be excused. 
But clumsy falsehoods, deliberate falsification of history, 
gross perversions, could by no means gain the end. 
For untruths on their face court examination and disproof. 


NOTE TO THE READER. 

The two next chapters, being controversial and in direct 
reply to a Life of Lord Bacon recently published,* may 
be avoided, and the biography resumed from page 147. 

* The ‘ Personal History of Lord Bacon, from Unpublished Papers, 
by William Hepworth Dixon, of the Inner Temple.’ 



THE WISDOM OF CERTAIN CRITICS. 


99 


CHAPTER VI. 

A simple author once expressed a wish that his enemy (a 
reviewer) would write a book. He had no thirst for revenge. 
He belieyed, that critics are not infallible—that if one of 
that genus appeared in print, the world could decide how 
much less talent it takes to ruin a book than to write it. 
With how much delight ought the world of authors to be 
infused, now that Mr. Dixon, the very prince of critics, 
has again appeared among their ranks. If one man could 
rejoice over a single foe in print, how many hearts must 
be gladdened by the sight of the common enemy of man¬ 
kind sacrificed on the altar of his own imbecility ! 

As the Editor of a literary oracle, as the sibyl of the 
modern temple of the Delphian Apollo, Mr. Dixon was 
constrained to take a dignified theme for his task. Shak- 
spere would have been most worthy perhaps the editor of 
an ‘Athenaeum ’ among the moderns, iEschylus or Homer 
among the ancients; but on the whole prudence forbade 
either of these subjects. Bacon came next. Yes, Bacon 
was an admirable theme. A life of Bacon. Yet un¬ 
happily little was to be said of Bacon; which being new 
would still be true, or true that would be new, unless 

F 2 


100 


loed macaulay’s ignokance. 


.labour was supplied, and labour would have been unworthy 
of genius. Bacon’s life had been written ably and ’well. 
Two of the greatest men of the day in their respective 
departments, Macaulay and Lord Campbell, had aspired 
to write the life of the modern successor to Aristotle’s 
chair. Need it be said that what two such men had 
attempted had been worthily performed ? Mr. Foss had 
also written an admirable memoir. But Mr. Dixon would 
outshine them all. He would convict Macaulay, as a bung¬ 
ling historian, and prove Lord Campbell’s ignorance of law. 
The public are gratified with wine stronger than can be 
made of grape. Mr. Dixon will supply them with an 
article precisely suited to their palate. The familiar 
image will, I hope, be pardoned in writing on so magni¬ 
ficent a theme as the labours of the modern Alcides of the 
‘ Athenaeum ;’ but the task was conceived, need I say that 
it was also executed ? 

Several lives of Francis Bacon have at various times 
appeared. His dependents and personal friends, en¬ 
deared to him by service with an indulgent master, had 
thought that the best part of publication in reference to 
his memory would be suppression. Contrary to the wish 
of his literary executor, the Lord Keeper Williams, after¬ 
wards Archbishop of York, his letters at various times 
crept into print. These convinced even the most cursory 
examiner that it were charity to the memory of so gifted 
a man, so great an intellectual benefactor, to allow his 
private life to fall quietly into oblivion. The contem¬ 
porary history of his own day had loaded him in many 
cases with infamy, in all with condemnation. D’Ewes, 
Wotton, Weldon, Chamberlain, Carleton, Osborne, Coke, 


THE VERDICT OF ALL MEN. 


101 


and their immediate successors, Clarendon, Wilson, White- 
lock, Racket, Rush worth, Camden, Rymer, Rapin, had 
supplied sufficient evidence, in many cases with great 
unwillingness, to show that little could be said in praise of 
Lord Bacon’s life, much in its blame. 

Awed by his genius, enamoured of his philosophy, the 
most zealous admirer of his intellect, the most enthusiastic 
historian of modern times, had found the task of honest 
admiration impossible as applied to his acts ; and, with the 
most splendid tribute to his great gifts, even more than was 
just, gave up the task in despair. If any key were needed 
to Lord Campbell’s transcendent success in life, it would 
assuredly be found in his 4 Lives of the Chancellors.’ The 
temper, the candour, the discrimination, the scholarly 
sympathy and the high integrity of the judge and the 
great lawyer are all to be found there. He essays to 
honour Bacon by a double sympathy as a lawyer and as 
a literary lover. Yet he concludes his labours with a 
deprecation of his own severity. He was more than kind 
—he was merciful and partial; but even he must rise 
from his judicial chair more in sorrow than in anger, 
and confess, while he sentences the greatest wit saving 
one of this English people, that Francis Bacon played a 
mean and ignominious part in this world’s history, was 
assigned noble gifts, a lofty station, a sacred duty, yet pros¬ 
tituted his genius, degraded his office, polluted his sacred 
robes, and basely surrendered his honour for lucre. But 
the Editor of the 4 Athenseum ’ is much wiser in his day and 
generation than these. He will prove Bacon to have been 
the most honest man in the world. As good as great. 
An angel of purity whom there was a general conspiracy 


102 


POWER OA r ER FACTS. 


to defame. He will prove Macaulay a mere charlatan, 
an impostor, who assigned an impossible character to 
Francis Verulam to gratify his own malice, and that poor 
Lord Campbell is an incapable and well-nigh imbecile 
personage, as ignorant of history as of law. 

Can it be denied that the task was a bold and noble 
one ? and is it not vastly to be regretted that it has not 
succeeded ? 

But if its conception was bold, its execution has been 
much bolder. One may search up and down through all 
history for a parallel to Mr. Dixon’s book. The aptitude 
of its wisdom is perfectly amazing. Whenever the author 
requires a fact, straightway that fact, as if by magic, 
appears. If he would prove that a particular plot was 
Popish or Protestant, that a particular act was done six 
or nine or twelve months before or after its actual occur¬ 
rence, the facts are obedient to the author’s will. They are 
no doubt subservient, knowing the author’s power. The 
wand of a great magician is known to the spirits that he 
conjures up. The great critic holds the lamp of Aladdin 
in his hands, and truths at once, obedient to command, 
marshal themselves in order, to his wish. His power is 
unlimited. If he would prove that Richard the Third 
built New London Bridge, or that the Duke of Welling¬ 
ton fought at Prestonpans, the feat would be accomplished : 
the simple recipe always at hand would equally apply. 
And it is to be sincerely regretted that the nation has not 
already secured the services of so vast a genius for an 
entirely new and National History of England. The 
result would be as undeniably original, as instructive. 

Mr. Dixon sets forth on his task by announcing that 


THE 4 ATHENiEUM ’ AND THE COLLIER FORGERIES. 103 

his life is from new and hitherto “ unpublished papers ” 
and this discovery of “ new facts ” and unpublished 
papers is the only part of his scheme that can be said 
not to be original. A friend of his, Mr. Payne Collier, 
some years ago published a pamphlet containing ‘‘new 
facts” about Shakspere just preliminary to a new 
edition being published of that Poet. The discovery 
stimulated curiosity, and impelled an enthusiastic and 
discerning public into purchase. Another edition was 
required, and “ further particulars ” issued from the press. 
This coincidence was repeated. A life of the Poet, or an 
edition of his works, being always preceded by “ new facts ” 
from “ unpublished papers.” Unluckily it was discovered 
recently, that nearly all these “ new facts ” were forged. It 
was requisite to defend their authenticity. Mr. Dixon 
was called in. The friend who will not sacrifice himself 
for another is surely unworthy the name. Mr. Collier, 
the discoverer of the new facts, wanted some one to aver, 
from personal examination, that a particular letter had 
not been fraudulently misprinted. The Editor of the 
‘ Athenaeum ’ was prepared for the task, and successfully 
accomplished it. In .the ‘ Athenaeum ’ of Feb. 25, 1860, 
will be seen how, having examined the letter in question,* 
he declares it was honestly printed, when at the same 
time he knew well that it had been most scandalously 
perverted, but this has nothing to do with Bacon, except 
this:— 

* Mr. Dixon says : “ We have been to Dulwich, and have seen Mrs. 
Alleyne's letter... The Fragments which remain are incapable of yielding 
any decisive proof either way." How absolutely false this statement 
was, may be proved by the most cursory examination of the lithograph 
facsimiles since made. 


104 


AN IGNORANT EDITOR. 


A new life of Bacon was needed, something different 
from anything that had appeared—something that would 
sell. The public taste must be stimulated. A new view 
of Richard the Third, of Judas, had been already pro¬ 
duced : a new life from “ unpublished papers ” of Bacon had 
not. Nothing was simpler. Mr. Payne Collier’s process 
of producing facts would supply everything that was 
desired. Sufficient temerity only was needed. That was 
promptly at hand. General ignorance of the subject 
would do much—an Editor’s power much more. It is 
true some trifling and elementary knowledge of law was 
required for the task, and this the editor of the 
‘ Athenaeum ’ had not. He was evidently unhappily 
ignorant, of even the most rudimentary facts in constitu¬ 
tional history. Plis ‘ Personal History of Lord Bacon/ dis¬ 
closes that he only vaguely understood the phrase “ Con¬ 
stitution,” and had hardly heard of the Petition of 
Right: that he was distinctly ignorant of the meaning of 
the word Benevolence, as applied to a tax without con¬ 
sent ; that he had never heard of the writ “ De Combu- 
rendo ”—this was of no moment. The old life is a mere 
drug; literature is in the condition which Lord Bacon 
himself happily described as the Vermiculate, and breeds 
maggots; the reviewers in great part were sure, and for 
the rest, ignorance in the public, but still further ignorance 
in the author would suffice. 

It is hardly necessary to say that the distinction be¬ 
tween familiar and non-familiar knowledge offers a wide 
scope of action to an adventurous mind. As a rule, an 
alteration of ten years in the date of one of Hannibal’s 
battles would pass unnoticed; but in the date of the 


NOVELTIES IN LITERATURE. 


105 


battle of Waterloo it would not. Yet for a man to write 
a life of Hannibal, and make such a blunder, would be as 
inexcusable in the one case as the other. If a man were 
to declare Bartholomew Legate, the Arian, the friend of 
Lord Southampton, it would not subject him to immediate 
exposure. Yet if he were to aver that Thurtell was the 
bosom friend of Lord John Russell he would expose him¬ 
self to instant detection. Mr. Dixon, in dealing with the 
Elizabethan age, was therefore to some extent safe from 
scrutiny or exposure, if the reviewers were averse. He 
unhesitatingly availed himself of every licence permitted 
to his position. He has not, indeed, performed the precise 
feat indicated, but he has accomplished some quite as 
marvellous and equally impossible, and an entirely new 
view of Lord Bacon’s character is the result. 

A new life of a great man who has been dead more 
than two hundred years, in opposition to all previous 
evidence, and that universal consent which is accepted as 
the law of tradition and of custom, presupposes special 
requisites of knowledge or research in its author. Un¬ 
deniably no nobler task falls to the lot of humanity than 
that of dispelling the mists of obscurity which hide a good 
man’s fame from the wonder and love of his fellows. 
This is the sun’s task. No nobler aspiration can be the 
infirmity of any mind than that which seeks to clear away 
from the tomb of a public benefactor or of some mighty 
genius the accumulation of years, which neglect, or 
ignorance, or malice have heaped about. Lord Macaulay 
has said, “ That there is scarcely any delusion which 
has a better claim to be indulgently treated than that 
under the influence of which a man ascribes every moral 

F 3 


106 


NO ABSOLUTE RULE OF CHARACTER. 


excellence to those who have left imperishable monuments 
of their genius.” But it may be even further declared, 
that to make a great man’s deeds shine as a light before 
men, to prove their wisdom, vindicate their intention, apply 
and utilize them, and alike free the labours and the 
labourer from aspersion, is a task worthy of any man, 
sufficient to consecrate any effort. 

If Mr. Dixon had attempted such a task, no matter 
how imperfectly, he should have commanded respect; had 
he been but content with drawing attention to Bacon’s 
great gifts and noble benefactions to posterity, and to 
excuse some of his derelictions from duty, he should have 
been honoured. But to pursue reputable modes of esta¬ 
blishing a conviction, and to attempt base and dishonour¬ 
able slanders of the dead for the mere purposes of novelty, 
for the mere result of trade, is worthy the severest con¬ 
demnation. The evidence seems certainly to suggest that 
this has been Mr. Dixon’s only aim. Before arriving at 
such a conclusion, it will be necessary, however, to make 
inquiry. 

The most superficial observer of man, the shallowest 
scrutiniser of his mental causation, knows “how won¬ 
derful a thing he is,” and how impossible it is to estimate 
or predict the origin of his acts, or to reach the seat 
of the emotions or the passions of this paragon of 
animals. The rule of character is a rule mi generis. 
The shallowest mind is inscrutable to the keenest observer: 
how much more is the profoundest mind inscrutable to 
the shallowest blunderer ! The most wonderful, the noblest 
study of mankind is man; but therefore it is also the most 
perplexing, mysterious, and difficult. Should it ever be 


difficulties in estimating human character. 107 

proved beyond question that the noblest author of all 
time, William Shakspere, was unworthy our love, it would 
hurt us to the quick to believe it; it would seem impossible ; 
the evidence would need to bear sifting : but if it were 
indisputable it must be accepted, and man could only 
“ wonder and admire.” 

Now the evidence concerning Lord Bacon’s acts is 
simply indisputable—it is absolute. Classified by that 
science which the acutest legal minds of all ages have 
recognized and established as the law of evidence, 
tested by its severest axioms, it is upon evidence of the 
highest class, evidence absolutely beyond question, that 
his character has been determined. Mr. Dixon was 
therefore peculiarly unfortunate in selecting an author 
on whom to practise. It is true Mr. Collier had exhausted 
Shakspere for the time ; but an artificial life of the great 
poet could have passed uncontradicted. There remains 
no evidence for or against his private character, except 
that of his labours, and these are in his case incomprehen¬ 
sible. Of Bacon, on the contrary, letters exist in his own 
hand which prove his villany—which prove that he black¬ 
ened innocent men behind their backs; that he dis¬ 
paraged his rivals to the king; that he meditated an 
entire scheme of overthrowing the legal system of his 
country by making the judges the mere tools of a despotic 
ruler and of a licentious and profligate court; that he 
took bribes ; that he acknowledged his guilt; that he 
systematically traduced his friends; that he helped his 
earliest, noblest, and best friend Essex to the scaffold; 
that his was the hand that brought down the axe upon 
Raleigh ; that he was in every moral sense a scoundrel 


108 


THE HUMAN DEFECTS. 


and a coward, but that intellectually he was a marvel 
greater than we knew him. That being left all but 
penniless, hated and envied by his relatives, disliked by 
the Queen, by his own sheer wit and talents he lifted 
himself above penury, above unmerited obscurity, and 
fought his way, inch by inch, every point disputed, to the 
Lord Chancellorship and the Peerage. Like the builder 
of the sea tower, many times the flood broke in and 
washed away his labours as they seemed to grow perfect 
in his eyes. Like the spider, he still toiled and spun, 
though his web was often broken. So he rose. Is there 
nothing to wonder at and speculate on in the life of such 
a man ? 

But a merely systematic perversion of history, the 
production of some few absolutely worthless papers, 
because they are “ unpublished,” combined with an entire 
ignorance of every legitimate source of evidence, or, at any 
rate, with a complete suppression of every authentic fact, 
is not likely to help us to a satisfactory conclusion, or to a 
radiant solution of the wonderful problem offered by the 
mighty mind of Francis Bacon. 

Lord Bacon's attitude in the eye of history is Majestic. 
It lacks none of the grandeur nor of the irregularity of 
nature. A mountain, his sides clothed with verdure, his 
head is above the clouds, capped by eternal snows. On 
one side there is a gentle ascent, on the other a sheer fall 
of blank destruction. 

Mild, generous, and humane in private life, he becomes 
cruel, covetous, unfeeling, when ambition steps in. He 
does not delight in cruelty, but he has no compunction in 
becoming cruel. Men are but puppets. If they are in 


THE CONSISTENCY OF TRUTH. 


109 


his path they must be swept away, the calamity is 
theirs. 

His image is that of au antique statue, colossal as to the 
upper limbs, below withered and shrunken. The head is 
Apollo’s, the feet are Pan’s. But all history, all mythology 
points to the same union of extremes, of opposites, of 
splendid virtues and degrading vices. That head of allur¬ 
ing beauty, of fatal fascination, whose womb is filthy and 
obscene, represents but figuratively the union of opposites 
in this material world. A little, a very little, philosophy 
will explain the enigma so far as this. Lord Bacon’s 
vices and his virtues sprung from the same sources. They 
were both begotten, like Minerva, of brains. Of him it 
was beyond all measure true, that he had only as good a 
heart as could be made out of brains. He was a man of 
daring ambition, of presumption, that can only be ex¬ 
plained by his imaginative idiosyncracy. He was without 
moral principle. He was destitute of physical (as dis¬ 
tinguished from intellectual) courage. He was supremely 
cautious. He preferred in all things the secret to the 
open course. His writings, his philosophy, his life, prove 
this. His acts, his philosophy, and even his very style of 
composition are of the same character. They were part 
of himself. His philosophy is his vera effigies. It is 
imperfect, audacious, and practical, alternately creeping 
and flying, patient and aspiring, equally condescending to 
the minutest, and even, as it seems, degrading trifles, 
and soaring to the loftiest heights. Judged by the 
universal it was fragmentary, so whs he. 

Even nature cannot combine impossible perfections. 
Those who would make Francis Bacon perfect, must first 


110 CHAEACTEE OF BACON’S MIND. 

perfect his philosophy too. The task is simply ridiculous. 
Truth, history, consistency, alike resist the monstrous 
innovation. But were his vices even greater, that is, 
more sanguinary than they were, the arch of his intellect 
could still sustain them. His benefactions to philosophy, 
to use one of his own images, would still float them down 
the stream of time. But as he was, he must now remain— 
as great in thought as pitiful in act. The details of his 
career are as definitely detailed as Domesday Book. His 
life is far above the impeachment of friends, or the malice 
of foes. Allowing every weight to the manners of the 
age, to the servile adulation and euphuistic respect 
assumed to persons in power, his letters to his king and 
to the king’s favourite, Yilliers, are still the most abject 
in all literature—unequalled for meanness, servility, and 
perfidy. Still judging him by these, contrasting these 
with his philosophy, it is in one sense neither strange nor 
wonderful that they were so. His emotions were all 
subject to his reason. As Coleridge has remarked on 
another point, his intellect did not come forward to justify 
his emotions, as they would in a well-ordered mind, but 
his intellect acted and his heart never beat. 

If all men and women had been mere abstractions, his 
pursuit of power, and the means he sought to gain it, 
would have been the most accurately adjusted that could 
have been devised. Every arrow he shot struck the butt. 
Even when, like Acestes, he shot skyward, his shaft was 
numbered among the constellations. The temper which 
could without warp give to every fact in an investigation 
its due weight and significance, which could penetrate 
with unerring insight into every weakness, either of logic 


A BAD LOVER. 


Ill 


or analogy, was a temper to philosophise and not to feel 
inhuman affairs. He had no enthusiasm. His love of 
the ideal tinged his philosophy, but it never mastered it. 
It graced his labours, but gave them no bias. His letters 
have no friendly warmth. Where are his fond epistles, 
lit by that lambent fancy, chastened by that mild and 
sometimes joyous temper, refined by that glowing yet 
delicate imagination, to the partner of his wedded life ? 
Where those eloquent appeals for man in bondage, for 
humanity in misery or in distress, for poverty, for enslaved 
man, that his noble eloquence could have penned ? Where 
is there any mourn made for his childless hearth, or pictures 
drawn such as childless men too often sigh upon, of 
prattling children clustering about a mother’s knee? 
Where his references to the lovely age of joyous infancy ? 
Alas! there are none. He was an all but friendless, 
childless, wifeless man. 

Like Pompey, he had but one faithful freedman. He 
was married, but there is not one letter to his wife, or, 
as far as I know, one reference to her in his writings, 
of a pleasing or affectionate kind. Woman, the sex for 
him might never have existed. He pens no sonnet or 
hymn in her praise, yet he loved beauty in nature beyond 
almost any man of his time. Man delighted him not, 
nor woman either. With Hamlet’s intellect he had 
Hamlet’s vein. Over a memory he might have grieved, 
over the abstraction dwelt lingeringly; for the possession 
he cared nothing. Nature was all in all; and that 
“ glorious overhanging canopy fretted with golden fire,” was 
to him an unspeakable wonder for ever. 

For this reason he had no zealous aspirations after 


112 


FALSE WITNESS. 


liberty. For this reason he dared no perilous flight of 
indignation for men oppressed, nay, what cared He, if they 
were fettered? In the heights of his philosophic mind 
there is much calm and ever-enduring snow. 

Amid all his MSS. and all the voluminous corre¬ 
spondence, referring to the two brothers Anthony and 
Francis, not one little letter exists penned by his heart. 
He was ambitious of posthumous distinction, wished, 
because the great men of antiquity had their letters pre¬ 
served, that his should be consecrated to fame too and 
published.* He handed them over to his literary executor. 
Yet among them all there is not one to his love. Is not 
this singular ? Is it not noticeable ? Only one or two 
playful, half-genial notes to speak to his quasi friendship, 
these are to inferiors ; for Bacon could be generous and 
beneficent better than affectionate or sincere. What of 
that? it is neither our place nor province to condemn. 
It is mere idleness to wonder. If there is a problem to 
solve, it lies in the inscrutable and unfathomable wisdom 
of the Creator, as manifested in one of his mightiest 
works; and Mr. Hepworth Dixon, by simply “ bearing 
false witness,” by confounding right and wrong, by falsi¬ 
fying dates, by inventing facts, will help us to no solution 
of the mystery—not even though twenty hirelings be 
found to swear the book wonderful; the mirror of truth ; 
the oracle of the time. If truth cannot solve the diffi¬ 
culty, and labour and reverence, presumption and igno¬ 
rance and falsehood certainly never will. Of that let 
every honest man be assured. 

The world is usually so little credulous of disinterested 
* Hacket’s ‘ Life of Williams.’ 


MR. DIXON’S PURE INVENTION. 113 

motives, that it will perhaps be assumed that I have some 
instinct beyond a mere love of truth in attacking Mr. Dixon's 
history—that I have been slighted, injured, or in some 
manner offended by him. To clear the ground away, I 
may simply say that we are mutually ignorant of each 
other. Not to know the editor of the ‘ Athenaeum ’ is to 
argue myself unknown, which is precisely my case. I am 
unknown, and have not even the advantage of knowing 
so distinguished a man. Unknown I should have re¬ 
mained in this matter, but that I feel so deeply the injury 
attempted against the memory of several Elizabethan 
heroes, the baselessness, as well as the infamous charac¬ 
ter of the scandals imputed to the men and women of 
Bacon’s day, that I felt constrained to appear in print. 
For Essex’s genius, for Essex’s beneficence, for Essex’s 
nobility of heart, I have always maintained the highest 
reverence. I know something of his motives, his career, 
his sufferings and death—worthy, as I hope, his honour 
and reputation. Suddenly I find him converted from the 
Bayard of my early days into one of the most selfish and 
inhuman monsters that have defaced the page of history. 

Because he has been dead more than two hundred 
years, are scurrilous slanders on his memory to - pass 
current as truth ? 

I had long looked on Peacham, the poor clergyman 
inhumanly racked by Bacon, as an innocent, suffering 
man. Innocent he must have been, or wherefore was he 
racked? He was, in Chamberlain’s language, only 
“ stretched ” to make him condemn himself, because there 
was no evidence against him, because he was innocent. 
Suddenly I find that he is one of the most horrible villains 


114 


THE DEFECT IN OLD THINGS. 


that the mind of man can conceive—a traitor doubly 
dyed, a perjurer, a suborner, “ a treacherous, kindless, 
soulless villain.” Similarly I had always regarded the 
Essex Plot as a mad escapade of a young nobleman driven 
half out of his wits with despair by the severity of the 
Queen. His disgrace at court, his exile from office, and 
his ill health, combining with the machinations of his 
enemies to work his ruin. Suddenly Mr. Dixon is pre¬ 
pared to assure me that Essex was a Catholic; that he 
was led by Blount; that the plot was Papist; that Blount 
was in London “ filling Essex House with the worst of his 
popish gangs,” when I knew him to be in the country; 
when history clearly shows that he could not have been 
present—and actually has told us how many Catholics 
were in the scheme, leaving us to infer how large a pro¬ 
portion were, like Mr. Grimaldi, “of no religion at all.” 
But it has not been this noble author’s mission to w r rite 
according to history. With only industry and a love of 
truth, any one could write thus. The genius of grand 
writing—and Mr. Dixon has to be sure a “ wonderfully 
fine style ”—is to be shown in declaring something alto¬ 
gether superior to facts—more splendid and marvellous. 
No one, perchance, will read what is only old and true. 
But when ’tis both new and astounding, who can help being 
enchanted ? 

For three or four generations, the most accomplished 
lawyers, the wisest judges, the ablest jurisconsults have 
maintained the profoundest admiration for the genius of 
Coke. Sir Edward Coke is perchance best known to 
the public as an author in conjunction with Littleton. 
People have heard of ‘ Coke upon Littleton,’ who have 


coke’s great fame. 


115 


heard of nothing else. But what Coke was upon Lit¬ 
tleton, or how he came to discourse or comment upon Little¬ 
ton at all, or who Littleton was, or how the names came 
into connexion, few persons have stayed to inquire. 

Now Coke was a great, a transcendant lawyer, and 
that will perhaps at first sight appear no recommenda¬ 
tion. But this was only part of his merit; though to be 
a great lawyer—a lawyer in the true sense—is very 
lofty praise. But Coke was more than this : he was such 
a lawyer as perchance only appears once in a thousand 
years. He was no such orderly jurisconsult as Ulpian or 
as Gaius. He was no such accurate reasoner or profound 
logician as Montesquieu. He was not so analytic or 
scrutinizing as Bentham. He was not an orator, states¬ 
man, lawyer, and wit, like Mansfield. Yet Coke’s mind 
was of such an order, as not merely to command the 
respect and admiration of his contemporaries, but of an 
authority, to make his word Law. Doubtless it will 
exist as law while the English language remains. Yet 
the spirit which dictated Coke’s labours was nobler than 
those works themselves. This is easily explicable. His 
gloss on Magna Charta neither displays great wit, in¬ 
tellect, nor erudition, yet intrinsically it is a nobler work 
than the 1 Novum Organuin.’ Intellectually, it is a 
wretched performance, crabbed in style, meagre in 
thought. Yet its declaration for the liberty and inde¬ 
pendence of man breathes from the noblest source of 
human inspiration. 

If Englishmen are free to-day, it is because Coke 
made them so. Coke was an irascible and an avaricious 
man. In one sense he was narrow-minded. He was a 


116 


THE USE OF MAGNA CHARTA. 


pedant. History discloses few loveable traits in his 
character. But Coke was the guardian of the common 
law. He stood in the breach between an oppressed 
people and an oppressing king. His defence against the 
king’s might—the law. His motto, “Lex tutissimus 
cassis”—“ The law is my surest defence.”* 

He had neither the parts, the grace of manner, the 
eloquence, the witching courtesy, the pliant temper of 
his great rival Francis Bacon. But he was a just judge. 
He loved the king (or his gifts); he loved his own 
money; but he loved the law, justice, truth, and liberty 
much more. Lord Macaulay had, as a scholar, but 
little sympathy with the “ crabbed lawyer,” and incident¬ 
ally has spoken slightingly of him as “a bigot and a 
pedant.” He had perhaps never taken the trouble to 
inquire into the obligations of posterity to Coke’s law. 
But inasmuch as Macaulay spoke harshly, Mr. Dixon, a 
much greater than he, has taken upon himself to exceed 
so humble an original; and from his pages the Great Chief 
Justice issues a compound of hobgoblin and pantaloon, very 
bloody to be sure, but very comical withal. Mr. Dixon can 
afford to despise Coke, to laugh at him, for he has barely 
heard of his labours. The 4 Personal History of Lord 
Bacon * proves that he cannot have read the Reports, or 
their declarations in the cause of liberty. 

Coke was the founder of what is now known as Con¬ 
stitutional Law. He furnished the corner-stone of the 
Petition of Right. He was the prime creator of the 
writ of habeas corpus, as it exists to us—the palladium 
of modern liberty, as it is called in parish vestries. 

* Literally, “ the law is the best helmet.” 


GRATUITOUS ZEAL. 


117 


Out .of Coke came the law of the long parliament. 
Out of Bracton, the 29th of Magna Charta, and the 25th 
Ed. 3rd,* Coke furbished up a weapon which, better than 
the sword of St. Denis, was to do its work; with 
which he could face the king—with which he could defy 
all tyranny. He did not make the weapon it is true, 
but he proved its use. That decree which is dead to the 
world, is dead to itself. He breathed life into it He 
showed its potency against the king. While all the cour¬ 
tiers of his day, with bated breath and whispered humble¬ 
ness said they would do as the king commanded, he alone 
said, “ I will do all that doth become a judge.” Neither 
wisdom, nor courage, nor statesmanship, could have availed 
in the crisis in which he was placed against kingly prero¬ 
gative. No new law would have served. What was wanted 
was proof of antique precedent, of a long-established right. 
Coke showed the right. His authority then, of all men 
living, was the only one that could establish it. But he 
would do more than this—he would defend it to the 
uttermost. Well as he loved his gold, his place, his 
fame, he would risk all, imprisonment and the Star 
Chamber, but he would have law. Coke was bigoted, 
and narrow-minded, and obstinate; and if he had not 
been bigoted, and narrow-minded, and obstinate, the 
29th chapter of Magna Charta had still been a dead 
letter. He will have nothing but the ipsissima verba. 
He will fight to the judgment on the strictest letter, as 
only a “ pedant and bigot ” could. If he had not been 
in the one sense narrow-minded, he could not have been 
so budded up in the common law, would have had more 
* St. 5, c. 4. 



118 


THE WORLD UNGRATEFUL. 


Catholic tendencies and leanings, and so have been useless 
for his mission. Being so builded up, tenacious, obsti¬ 
nate, he made the common law of England a defence 
against princes. Had he loved the law less, he had loved 
the king more. But the law was his mistress. If the 
king will imprison his subjects without trial, tax them 
without consent, will unscrupulously clap every litigious, 
bold, obnoxious, or argumentative Politician, into prison, 
or send him to the Bermudas, Coke will have the law 
on him. For is not the law above the king ? 

Coke will, from his place in parliament, as the oracle 
of law, with puritanic precision show, that from all time 
the English law has been ample enough to clothe the 
freeman with liberty. He invests every Englishman 
with a cloak of invulnerability. He puts in his hand a 
sword of defence. He declares that the spirit of justice 
has said, in words of law, Let no free man be disseised of 
his tenure ; let no man be denied justice; let no man be 
imprisoned except by due process of law and trial by his 
equals. Let this be made a fact. Let a writ be issued 
as of right at all times on necessity, to free the subject. 
The principles he advanced we claim as inherent rights. 
We accept them as we do the air we breathe, the 
water we drink, giving no man thanks, or Heaven either. 
But because we are ungrateful, it is not incumbent that 
we should permit even a great critic, being ignorant, to be 
defamatory too. 

There is not, there never was, any necessity to defame 
Coke that Bacon should appear brighter than before. 
This is only clumsy craft. Some stains lie justly upon 
his fame. I have no wish to remove them ; they are 


THE “CONSCIENTIOUS” OTHELLO. 119 

better where they are. But I protest against calumny. 
In the same purely gratuitous spirit of zeal that Mr. Dixon 
falsified the Alleyn letter, he is now prepared to falsify 
Coke’s life—to utter any number of counterfeit tales. Like 
the Nicholas Nickleby Othello he will “conscientiously 
blacken himself all over.” The question happily is not one 
of fiction but of fact. No re-edifying of the ancients, no 
invention, can fortunately crush the evidence which exists. 
It cannot even be tampered with. If it could, the cost of 
removing the dirt and obloquy from the grave of one man 
to heap it up elsewhere, and so hide brave deeds, the 
memory of which posterity will not willingly let die, 
might be deemed excessive. 

I will not pause here, even hurriedly to recount some 
of the Great Chief Justice’s services to the state. Of his 
noble defence of freedom. Of his bold opposition to the 
king. Protesting against the slanders now invented against 
him, and fifty others against innocent persons equally base¬ 
less, equally base, I will proceed to comment on some few 
passages of Mr. Dixon’s wonderful book, and show, how 
scandalously the author has in some instances dared to 
pervert history, and to breed “new facts” and “further 
particulars ” from “ papers never before published.” At 
the same time I have no desire to take any reader by the 
button, like the Ancient Mariner, and tell him a story 
which he may be unwilling to hear, so will place the 
evidence in another supplementary chapter. 


120 


REVIEWERS UNJUST. 


CHAPTER VII. 

Those admirable reviewers who have sounded all the 
depths and shoals of adulation, to do scant justice to Mr. 
Dixon’s book, have still omitted (and it must be a source 
of extreme grief and mortification to them) to praise 
him for many of his unique merits. They have chosen 
to dwell on those minute qualities which he possesses, in 
common with some other great men, instead of pointing 
out those excellencies which he is singular in exhibiting, 
and which no other writer has ever manifested in a similar 
degree. This is surely a culpable carelessness. As an 
imaginative historian, as combining the delicious un¬ 
reality of the romance with the form of history, Mr. Dixon 
never has been, and probably never will be equalled. 
Again, in those by-ways of history which so few eminent 
historians care to explore, the scandals of contemporary 
libellers, he is so much at home. But his skill in weaving 
narrative, in creating lofty passages of declamation, on a 
fact, that fact being erroneous, must give place in the 
honour which it inspires, to his skill in creation. 

In the year 1848, Mr. G. Lillie Craik—the name is well 
and honourably known in literature—produced a book 


‘THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY.’ 


121 


called ‘The Romance of History.’ It purported to give 
an insight into the domestic life and annals of some of 
the most distinguished men and families of the Elizabethan 
period. In its preface it set out by declaring that it did 
not profess great accuracy. Its title, ‘ Romance of His¬ 
tory,’ forbade any too rigorous criticism. Among its 
illustrations of ‘ Romance ’ it furnished lives of Letitia 
(Lettice) Knollys, the mother of Robert Devereux, second 
Earl of Essex, and her third husband, Christopher Blount. 
As might be supposed, it deals in an imaginative vein 
with the chronicles; but by some means or other dwarfs 
or impoverishes the greater number of the characters it 
touches on, not intentionally, perhaps, but rather inevitably. 

The young Earl of Essex is spoken of as the “ Flashy 
Earl,” or in some equivalent manner. This species of 
treatment of a poet, orator, statesman, and general, is 
hardly calculated to inspire our respect toward the hero 
indicated. Blount, on the strength of his having been 
the agent of selling his wife’s jewels, is concluded to 
have sold them for himself; why, is not at all clear. It is 
proved that the second husband left her very much in 
debt, rich in jewels and land, but miserably poor in purse, 
and the natural conclusion was that he sold these jewels, 
by his wife’s consent, for their mutual necessities. All 
the Countess’s correspondence with her son, Essex, all her 
incidental allusions to her husband, show the greatest 
love and affection. The son’s behaviour to his father-in- 
law proves as fully, that no very considerable breach 
could have existed between Blount and his wife. From 
Mr. Craik’s hands Blount appears a not very virtuous 
soldier of fortune, possibly a spy, and a profligate spend- 


122 


IMAGINATIVE PAINTING. 


thrift. Mr. Craik gives his authorities for such a presump¬ 
tion, and it is only fair to say that they bear no adequate 
construction, but, to some extent, induce suppositions the 
very reverse. He is presumed a spy on the evidence of 
certain letters of Thomas Morgan, in which Blount is 
pointed out as likely to give information to Mary, Queen 
of Scots. Blount unfortunately was a Catholic. So, for 
the matter of that, was Sir Philip Sidney. This appears 
to be the head and front of his offending. It was natural 
that he should sympathize with Mary. It was natural 
he should desire to aid her cause. Yet for what reason 
cannot be discovered, Mr. Craik thinks he betrayed her 
cause to the Cecils. This is the imaginative supposition 
on which he is presumed to be a Spy.* 

This is sufficient for Mr. Dixon, who, in his anxiety to 
conscientiously blacken every contemporary of Bacon, and 
especially every relative of Essex's, vastly improves on 
Mr. Craik’s narrative, and inventing as he proceeds, 
rears up a delightful superstructure of scandal. The 
ingenuity in the choice of an authority is hardly sur¬ 
passed by the treatment of that authority. For historical 
purposes, Mr. Craik’s narrative is certainly superior to 
4 Monte Christo,’ or the ‘ Three Musketeers,’ or even 
the c Arabian Nights;’ but Mr. Craik had little idea 
how skilfully his material would be used, and the burden 
of proof shifted on to his shoulders. Here is the 

* In Murdin’s letters and despatches of Lord Burleigh, there are 
several letters of Morgan’s, referring to Blount, in all of which he is 
spoken of in the highest terms. Morgan was a faithful servant and an 
honest man. Blount was undoubtedly a zealous partisan of Mary, 
Queen of Scots, but this is hardly a crime. (See Wood’s ‘ Athense 
Oxoniensis.’) 


CHRISTOPHER BLOUNT’S FLATTERING PORTRAIT. 123 


passage as it appears in Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s 
pages :— 

The third husband of Lady Leicester is her match in 
licentiousness, more than her match in crime. By pro¬ 
fession a bravo and a spy, Blount is incapable either of 
feeling for his wretched wife the manly love of Essex, or 
of treating her with the lordly courtesy of Leicester. 
Brutal and rapacious, he has married her, not for her 
bright eyes, now dim with rheum and vice, but for her 
jewels, her connections, and her lands. He cringed to 
Leicester, that he might sell the secrets of his cabinet 
and enjoy the pleasures of his bed. With the same blank 
conscience, he wrings from the widow her ornaments and 
goods. Chain, armlet, necklace, money, land, timber, 
everything that is hers, wastes from his prodigal palm. 
He beats her servants ; he thrusts his kinsfolk upon her; 
he snatches the pearl from her neck, the bond from her 
strong box. A villain so black would have driven a novelist 
or playwright mad. Iago—Overreach—Barabas,—all the 
vile creatures of poetic imagination—are to him angels of 
light. What would have been any other man’s worst vice, 
is Blount’s sole virtue, a ruthless and unreasoning constancy 
to his creed. Fear and shame are to him the idlest of 
idle words; and, just as he would follow the commands of 
his general, he obeys the dictation of his priest. Asa 
libertine and as a spy, his days have been spent in dodg¬ 
ing the assassin or in cheating the rope. Waite was 
sent by Leicester to kill the villain who had defiled his 
bed; Blount repaid the courtesy by prompting or con¬ 
niving at Leicester’s death. Taught by Cardinal Allen, 
deep in the Jesuits’ plots, he has more than once put his 

G 2 


124 


BRILLIANT TESTIMONY. 


neck so near the block that a world which neither loves 
nor understands him hugs itself in a belief that he must 
have bought his safety from arrest and condemnation by 
selling to Walsingham or Cecil the blood of better and 
braver men.” 

This is not a flattering portrait, and it is perhaps well 
for Mr. Dixon, that when the brains are out, a man does 
die. If now they rose again “ with twenty mortal murders 
on their crowns,” he might fare badly at the hands of poor 
Blount. Although we must give our highest admiration 
to a genius which could so entirely fabricate a story, 
and then place the responsibility on another, it is scarcely 
fair to a dead man’s memory or his living representatives, 
that the matter should be left thus. Mr. Craik is given 
as its authority. On referring to Mr. Craik, however, not 
one tithe of it appears there. “ The cringing to Leicester,” 
“ the marriage for money,” “ the eyes dimmed with 
rheum,” “ the pearl snatching,” “ the dodging the as¬ 
sassin,” and “ the cheating the rope,” are all parts of Mr. 
Dixon’s imaginative history. I will merely say, in reply 
to it, that there is not a word nor a syllable of truth in the 
whole. 

Blount was a gentleman and a soldier, a noble and a 
valiant knight. The story about Waite is a grossly im¬ 
probable fiction, as improbable as a hundred thousand 
other fictions of the age. It is refuted by Leicester’s own 
will made long after, in which, in terms of the fondest 
endearment, of the most loving affection, he leaves the 
chief bulk of his property to his wife, which is hardly 
probable if he had suspected Blount of being improperly 
in her confidence. After he had become the husband of 


FLATTEKING FICTIONS. 


125 


the widowed countess, her references to him are full of 
affection. But there is not one tittle of evidence worthy 
the name to impeach Blount’s character at all. On the 
other hand, the concurrent testimony of witnesses as to 
his death, proves him to have been a valiant, noble soldier, 
of whom nothing in life became him better than his manner 
of leaving it. His behaviour on his trial, his wife’s cor¬ 
respondence, the reference in Morgan’s letters, completely 
substantiate this view of his character. He was not a 
Papist. He was certainly not a bravo. He was as cer¬ 
tainly not a spy. I have yet to learn that to be born a 
Catholic is a stigma. The delicious spicing of the dainty 
dish, “ the eyes filled with rheum ” (the lady was between 
forty and fifty years of age when she married"), the cuffing, 
pawning, defiling her husband’s bed, are Mr. Dixon’s own, 
and it is most ungenerous that his admirers should with¬ 
hold from him the praise of it. 

But this is scarcely all. He is, in addition, stigmatized 
as “a Murderer by profession and a bravo,” with whom 
his wife had “ wallowed in licentious love ” during her 
preceding husband’s life, “ a wretch without grace, accom¬ 
plishments, or parts.” Apropos to what, does the reader 
conceive? This, and this only. He married Essex’s 
mother. Essex was betrayed by Bacon. To prove Bacon 
right, it is necessary to prove Essex wrong. The more 
conscientiously to blacken Robert Devereux, it is necessary 
to defame his mother. The better to pollute his mother’s 
memory, make infamous the husband. It is fortunate 
that the historian did not extend his zeal further—to the 
parish clerks and beadle of the same parish. That the 
Editor of the 4 Athenaeum ’ may achieve fame, new 


126 


a critic’s candour. 


history has to be produced. If he will go through so 
much—to attain so small an end, what might he ac¬ 
complish if his ends were commensurate ? 

Of the merit of this species of historic composition no 
doubt can exist. Macaulay was but a poor and barren 
scholar in the art—a cold aspirant for such honour. 
On a scale of adequate dimensions, with a few facts 
at its disposal, what might such genius achieve, when it 
can attain such results without any facts at all ? 

Though very willing to do further justice to the Editor 
of the 4 Athenaeum,’ after what may perhaps appear my 
disparaging remarks in a preceding chapter, and thus 
handsomely finish what his admirers have done so ill, I 
purpose, as it would be obviously unfair to pass in review 
a work which is of the same uniform consistency through¬ 
out, to point merely to one or two similar instances of 
accuracy and candour. But before doing this, I wish to 
declare that I have no desire, while intending justice 
to Mr. Dixon’s genius, to lose sight of his smaller ability. 
Thus, for instance, in the very letter from which the con¬ 
struction is drawn, the mere inference, which is not ob¬ 
vious to other eyes, that Blount is a spy, there is direct 
testimony to his character, which is this : “ He (Blount) is 
a tall gentleman and a valiant, and hath been well 
brought up by his careful and devout parents, which be 
good Catholics; and this Blount is of an ancient house, 
and his father, who was kin to Leicester, honoured him 
and his father much of a long time, but was by him, 
Leicester, most ungratefully requited in the end.” And 
again, referring to Blount’s mother, the same correspon¬ 
dent, Morgan, speaks of her as “ a most notable, honest 


THE IMAGINATIVE ART. 


127 


gentlewoman.” Here we have direct evidence as to virtue, 
indirect evidence as to vice. To reject the direct and sub¬ 
stantial evidence, and convert the indirect into substantial 
proof, imparting to what is worthless value, has always 
been held a minor attribute of genius, and this must 
in several instances be claimed by Mr. Dixon. Weldon 
deposes some facts that he has seen and some that he has 
heard as rumours. The things seen by the witness are re¬ 
jected, the hearsay and report are unhesitatingly adopted 
—adopted in precisely the same spirit, that Mr. Craik’s 
evidence of Blount is annexed, with marvellous additions. 

Let us suppose this mode of treating history applied to 
men of the day, by losing sight of what is known, and by 
cleverly bringing forward what some one has written or 
printed, or has been heard in some vague manner. What 
charming and piquant histories might be written ! Thus, 
it has been said that a certain cardinal of our day had 
three wives; that a certain great lord chancellor was a 
notorious drunkard; that a certain monarch had mur¬ 
dered his mistress: the names need not he given, lest 
some future Mr. Dixon should adopt them. It matters 
not, that no human being ever believed the wretched 
calumnies out of the debased circle which originated 
them. But here would be the narrative, of course al¬ 
lowing for the circumstance that no imitation could he 
made that would be just to Mr. Dixon’s superb style. 

“ This great lord was a notorious drunkard. The 
Dutch masters, who revelled with all the grossness of 
filthy and licentious natures in the coarsest delineation ol 
the vilest bestiality, could only feebly express the degra¬ 
dation of his habits, the paltry squalor of his nature. He 


128 THE “ BENEVOLENCE.” 

left- his home daily, his children clamouring for food, his 
patient wife hungry and distressed, to seek that excite¬ 
ment in blue ruin which desires such as his could alone 
be satisfied with. Day after day his furniture was re¬ 
moved to gratify his selfish lust. His children, hungry 
and supperless, crept about his deserted hearth. All the 
necessaries of the household had been pawned for food. 
But the cursed demon of drink had begotten an enemy 
more potent than itself; and now he passes his hours in 
the most licentious profligacy, with the most sensual and 
abandoned occupants of those dens of infamy which defile 
the face of Europe. Honour and honesty become to him 
mere idle words. He degrades the Bench into a pot¬ 
house ; he converts the Woolsack into a Pandemonium. 
He pollutes his office by cruelty. He is threatened by the 
victims of his tyranny. He is compelled to skulk from 
pillar to pillar as he reels to his drunken and degraded 
home. The world pursues him with a ‘howl of execra¬ 
tion,’ policemen ‘ crash down ’ upon him, &c., &c.” 

This might be regarded as a fanciful portrait, but, all 
things considered, it does feeble justice to Mr. Dixon’s 
powers, or to his accuracy of delineation. 

We will now proceed to his treatment of the character of 
Mr. Oliver St. John. His case is simply this. James I. 
had an aversion to parliaments ; he had a belief that he 
could tax his people by prerogative, and without the consent 
of the Lords and Commons. He issued a mandate, or writ, 
to levy sums of money in the form of “ A Benevolence.” 
In other words, he went begging of his subjects: but 
the begging was to be called by another name. The 
subject was to give under fear, and the gift was to be 


ILLEGAL INFRACTIONS. 


129 


called a free gift. Not a loan, nor an impost, nor a tax, but 
a benevolence. Nominally there was no threat attached to 
non-payment; but every defaulter was returned to the 
Privy Council, and of course remembered. It differed 
from begging with threats, only in this, the stout cudgel 
of the sturdy vagrant was half concealed instead of being 
wholly exposed. 

Bacon was at this time,* James’s adviser. Bacon was 
a man suavibus modis , and recommended this polite 
coercion. It was not a new device. It was of doubtful 
legality. Monarchs in feudal times had made such an 
appeal to their subjects; but as far back as the reign of 
Edward I. a law had been passed to put down this 
insidious beggary, and especially directed to these so-called 
voluntary gifts and free grants; the statute 25 Ed. I., 
cap. 6, running “ that henceforth no such aid, tasks, free 
grants, or prizes ” be taken or demanded but by consent 
of the realm and for the good thereof. 

Later on, the grievance again raised its head, and the 
first Act of Richard III. cap. 2, was devoted to its ex¬ 
tinguishment for ever. Henry VII. attempted again the 
illegal infraction, and in the tenth year of his reign a 
statute passed, which gave them a colourable legality, by 
giving powers for the collection. In spite of this, however, 
the law was deemed an infraction of the constitution, and 
had not been put in force by succeeding monarchs. 
Recourse was made to loans in preference. The King, as 
a bad paymaster, had now become unable to borrow, 
therefore Bacon suggested a Benevolence. A notice was 
issued that every person might give to the king who liked. 

G 3 


* 1614. 


130 


HISTORIC TRUTH, 


The authorities of each town were ordered to communicate 
with the men of substance in their neighbourhood; and 
all the machinery of the state, directed by the King, was 
put in force to aid the enterprise. No man was com¬ 
pelled to give. He was simply disaffected and disloyal 
if he did not. This, at least, must be conceded. It is 
of course idle to call it a free gift; there was no ap¬ 
proach to spontaneity. Every man of means was directly 
appealed to. Refusal had before been followed by impri¬ 
sonment, banishment, and fine. 

Against this scandalous but insidious attempt to infringe 
the law, Mr. Oliver St. John, a gentleman of Marlborough, 
was bold enough to write. He was, like many gentlemen 
of his time, well grounded in law. He knew the Tax was 
illegal. He therefore sent, in the form of a letter, a Pro¬ 
test to the Mayor of Marlborough, couched in the most 
moderate terms, showing that the Impost was unlawful. 
The letter is printed in the State Trials, and will be seen 
to be of the most moderate and reasonable kind. He 
declared Benevolences to be against law. For this offence 
Bacon summoned him before the Star Chamber. The 
act was neither more nor less harsh than a hundred others 
of which he was guilty. As a violation of the law it has 
been considered somewhat indefensible in his legal career. 
Mr. Dixon—who shows clearly enough that he does not 
know what a Benevolence means, and had never heard of 
the word till he saw it used in this case, and is wholly 
perplexed by its really technical character—only knows 
that Lord Campbell has criticised Bacon in the affair. 
Mr. Dixon therefore proceeds to lecture our late lamented 
Chancellor on his ignorance :— 


lord campbell’s ignorance. 


1 31 


“ Lord Campbell (who confounds * this Oliver St. John 
with the famous lord chief justice of the Commonwealth, 
now a boy of sixteen !) appears to regard St. John as an 
earlier Hampden. A closer reading of the time would 
show that he was one of those loud and lying politicians 
who are the disgrace of every cause. Instead of being 
the Hampden, Black Oliver was the O’Brien or the 
O’Connor of his time, though he had neither Smith 
O’Brien’s abilities nor Fergus O’Connor’s dash.” Mr. 
Dixon proceeds to stigmatize him as the “ Marlborough 
Bully,” “ as begging, fawning, groaning to be let out (of 
jail),” concluding : “ Even those who make an idol of every 
one barred in the Tower turn from this pusillanimous and 
crouching prisoner in disgust.” 

Now after the example given in Blount’s case, the 
reader will be prepared to understand that this is wholly, 
absolutely, and completely without foundation. That there 
is not even the slenderest fact as a basis for this compli¬ 
mentary portrait. That the whole is another proof of Mr. 
Dixon’s transcendant imagination—of his glowing fervour 
when attacking the dead; and that it is another sprig of 
laurel to add to his poetic bays. Mr. Dixon’s contempt 
for truth approaches the sublime : it is more than heroic. 
St. John is likened to O’Brien, wherefore? For aught 
that he has gleaned to the contrary from Lord Campbell’s 
‘ Lives,’ he was the Washington of his time. Despite 
this attack, this solitary, well-written letter is the sole 
political offence of Mr. St. John. This is rather slender 
material on which to call a man an O’Brien, to pronounce 

* This is an imaginary imputation. Lord Campbell does not in the 
remotest manner suggest such a conclusion. 


132 


HISTORIC ACCURACY. 


$t on his abilities or his dash.” In prison, after having lain 
there many months, possibly moved by the entreaties of a 
wife and children, he writes a letter to the king, almost as 
abject as some of Bacon’s epistles. For this one offence 
people are represented as turning from this “ pusil¬ 
lanimous and crouching prisoner in disgust.” 

The “ Great Critic” having shown how much he tran¬ 
scends Macaulay in style and accuracy, and Lord Camp¬ 
bell in law, I think his panegyrists will be grateful for the 
proof that he equally transcends Ainsworth or Dumas in 
imagination ; and that literally no encomiums on its vast¬ 
ness would do it justice. 

As an instance, to pass to his treatment of the great, the 
wise, the renowned Lord Coke, and withholding for the 
present such statements as are mere fabrications. 

First, to point out Mr. Dixon’s accuracy in the detail 
of facts, one passage will suffice. “ Coke arms a dozen 
of his servants, rides down to Oatlands, runs a beam against 
Withipole’s door, and smashing into his wife’s retreat, 
without warrant of arrest, he seizes the fainting girl, 
tosses her into her coach, and hurries her away to Stoke, 
a Universal Howl pursuing the perpetrator of this offence.” 

Now an ordinary man’s description of this affair would 
have been different; but apart from the fault that it so 
scandalously suggests, that a chief justice was himself the 
first to break the law—an unpardonable suggestion in so 
accurate an historian—I may remark, if a well-informed 
contemporary is to be believed, that there is not a word 
of this true. 

Coke did not arm a dozen of his servants—why a 
dozen, why not thirteen ?—did not ride down to Oatlands; 


THE KING UNDER THE LAW. 


133 


did not run a beam against Withipole’s door; did not 
smash into his wife’s retreat; did not proceed without 
warrant of arrest; and no Universal Howl pursued the 
perpetrator of the offence, that I can ascertain. 

Coke’s daughter was at Hampton. Armed with a 
Warrant from the Privy Council, signed by Win wood, 
several times referred to in Bacon’s correspondence, 
he went to fetch her. In pursuit of his warrant he 
broke open, perchance, the door of the house in which 
she was secured ; this was probably the extent of the facts. 

So much for our historian’s accuracy, which is certainly 
uniform. Now for his moderation and reverence in deal¬ 
ing with noble reputations. 

Coke, as I have shown, was no ordinary benefactor of 
his race ; no ordinary patriot. He had resisted every 
unconstitutional act of James, from the commencement of 
his avowed attack on the liberties of the subject. In 
1608, Coke had struck at the power of the Court of High 
Commission, in direct opposition to the king. The eccle¬ 
siastical judges were the king’s servants. They lent them¬ 
selves to every infraction of law or liberty he might desire. 
Coke issued prohibitions to limit the bounds of their ser¬ 
vility. The churchmen complained. The king called 
the two parties in the dispute before him. Bancroft 
insisted * that the Scripture settled supreme and absolute 
authority to make or rescind laws at pleasure in the 
king. Coke challenged the impudent and servile decla¬ 
ration. The king is thus attacked. He defends Ban¬ 
croft. Coke quotes Bracton, “ Quod rex non debet esse 
sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege ”—“ The king is not 
under man, but is still subject to God and the law.” A 
* 12 Rep. 50. 885. 


134 


coke’s new character. 


moderate doctrine enough. The chancellor, Egerton, 
divided against Coke, and the judges of the exchequer went 
with him. Coke’s puisne judges stand by him. The discus¬ 
sion had the necessary result—the court was reformed, and 
limited in jurisdiction. In 1610 he resisted the king’s 
attempt to force arbitrary proclamations on his people as 
law. Two, hindering the manufacture of starch, and for¬ 
bidding new buildings in and about London, with heavy 
penalties for infringement, were called in question by the 
people amid popular clamour. Coke was required to give 
his weighty opinion in favour of their legality. The court 
signified how they wished his ruling to be. Coke declined 
to give his opinion at once. He was not strong enough 
alone to stem the tide of king and venal courtiers. He 
asks to consult his judges, “ that he might make an 
advised answer according to law and reason.” The chief 
baron and another composed his council. They agreed 
with Coke that such proclamations were illegal. Coke 
carried his point, and contrived to divide the responsibility, 
which otherwise had been too great for him. 

The judgment given was that the proclamations were 
neither according to common law, statute law, nor the law 
of custom ; that the king had only such Prerogative as 
the Law allowed him. If the offence be not punishable in 
the Star Chamber, the mere proclamation of its illegality 
cannot make it so.* He opposes the King on “ Com- 
mendams.” t His legal life has been one long struggle for 
liberty. Mr. Dixon’s reverence for his patriotism may 

* 12 Rep. 74. 

f Commendams. This may be termed a slang phrase used to 
designate a power arrogated by the king of permitting bishops and 
other patrons of ecclesiastical livings preferment to hold a plurality of 
benefices, or, as it was then termed, certain livings “ in commendam.” 


THE EFFECT OF GREAT EXAMPLE. 


135 


be elucidated by a few of the epithets he has heaped 
upon him. He is spoken of as “ a brutal and obsequious 
slave as “ raving for gibbets and pillories as “ having 
a thirst for blood which parched up his soulas 44 bent 
on hanging all those miserable wretches ” confided to his 
justice as a judge; as 44 shrinking in shame from the sight 
of all this devilry (his wife’s acts) to his den at Sergeant’s 
Inn as being 44 a penurious old curmudgeonwith twenty 
other allusions and phrases if possible more vituperative. 

Admiration of Mr. Dixon’s genius may tempt us aside 
for a moment from Justice; but even an Editor of a critical 
journal, a reformer of Macaulay, an instructor of Campbell, 
may be (however profane seems the thought)—in error. 
If such authorities are at liberty to so abuse dead men, 
let us consider what inferior writers may do—when they 
arise. Mr. Dixon is like the great toe of Menenius : he 
goes in advance, and for the same reasons. Let him then 
consider what will be the effect of his lofty example on 
the Historic mind. Lord Coke was a judge, was a chief 
justice, was a most honourable and upright man. Only 
one impeachment, on almost worthless evidence, lies against 
his otherwise unsullied fame. He was one of the noblest 
heroes who ever defended The Right against Might. He 
has descendants still living. Surely something is due in 
respect, if not in reverence; from sentiment, if not from 
knowledge. 

For a great Patriot this imaginative character assigned 
to him is harsh. Let us pursue in imagination the 
sequence of this dereliction. If such mighty genius goes 
astray, what will poor, silly, illiterate people do ? As an 
instance. The Duke of Wellington was not a greater 
man than Coke. With reverence for some persons’ preju- 


136 


MR. LINGARD’s HONESTY. 


dices, he was vastly inferior morally; intellectually his 
superior. Yet he was a hero, to be loved, revered, and 
held in honour. What if some equally gifted inventor 
should some day declare him guilty of infamous intrigues, 
with thirsting for blood, with being the tool of a base 
faction, or heap any other equally scandalous imputation 
on his name and memory ? The wit might be admired, 
but hardly the utility of the act; and yet Coke was a 
man even more to be revered than the Great Duke. All 
the story of Coke’s intrigue with Villiers and Williams to 
overset Bacon is simply false. It has not a shadow of 
foundation. On the contrary: it is simply in opposition 
to all the evidence. It is as true as that William the 
Conqueror, after beating Julius Caesar at Marston Moor, 
departed in the ‘ St. George ’ for Botany Bay. It is not 
a whit less outrageous. But here Mr. Dixon’s genius 
again shines. No one ever thought of it before. Even 
Bacon, hard pressed as he was, dared not insinuate so 
much. It needed the genius of a modern editor to con¬ 
ceive it, and utter it when conceived. I could push the 
theme much further, but have no wish to nauseate my 
readers. 

Mr. Lingard, following the example of fifty other 
writers, Protestant and Catholic, has alluded, as a possi¬ 
bility, to Essex’s friendship with the virgin queen being 
more or less than platonic. Disagreeing with Mr. Lingard 
in most of his conclusions from the same premises, looking 
at everything from a different point of view, it is com¬ 
petent to declare that he has, considering his tempta¬ 
tions, considering the unfairness to which the cause he 
represented has been exposed, sinned less grievously 
than many others on the score of partiality. This is no 


ELOQUENT PURITY. 


137 


great praise. But something more might be allowed. 
He has but rarely falsified evidence on any point, though 
he has made inexact deductions — deductions most 
opposed to truth. On the connection between Essex and 
Elizabeth he has said: “ On the death of Leicester, 
he succeeded to the post of prime favourite; the Queen 
required his constant attendance at court, and her indul¬ 
gence of his caprice cherished and strengthened his 
passions.”* This is, as far as I know, the strongest 
defamatory passage on the connection between Essex and 
the Queen which can be adduced. If there is a stronger 
it can be urged. Of Elizabeth’s behaviour to her other 
favourites he speaks more severely, but this is not to the 
point. On her affection for Essex, and on this passage, 
Mr. Dixon has this nobly-eloquent commentary: “ That 
she ever loved him more than a lady of sixty years may 
love her cousin’s grandchild*)* is a monstrous lie. No 
woman can believe it; no man but a monk could have 
dreamt it. Yet this lie against chastity and womanhood 
has been repeated from generation to generation for two 
hundred and sixty years. It oozed from the pen of Father 
Parsons. It darkens the page of Lingard. Like most of 
the scandals against her—her jealousy of the wives of 
Leicester, of Raleigh, of Essex even—it came from those 
wifeless monks, men of the confessional and the boudoir, 
who spent their nights in gloating with Sanchez through 
the material mysteries of love, and in warping the tender¬ 
ness and faith of women into the filthy philosophy of their 
own Disputationes de Sancta Matrimonii Sacramento.” 

Unluckily for our new and imaginative historian, the 

* Lingard, vol. vi., p. 539. 

f He was her first cousin’s own son. 


138 


MRS. CANDOUR. 


jealousy of Elizabeth of Leicester’s wife, and of Raleigh’s, 
is altogether beyond dispute, and did not originate with 
Parsons, but is one of the best-authenticated facts in all 
history. But that may pass. After such an ebullition of 
virtue we may well suppose that our modern purist carefully 
avoids scandal. Yet, singular to say, there is not a woman 
dragged on his page who is not so begrimed, so befouled, so 
hideously bedaubed with mire, as to be unrecognizable. 
Mr. Dixon’s text-book is Parsons’ own libel. He draws all 
his lore from it. He attacks Lady Rich, one of Essex’s 
two sisters. He insinuates the grossest slanders, on the 
supposition that she was the Stella of Sidney’s verse. 
There are three answers to these: First, that it is not 
proved that she was Stella. Southey’s opinion is to the 
contrary. In the next, there is nothing to show that the 
love between Astrophel and Stella ever passed the bounds 
of honour. Allowing for the Euphuistic phraseology of the 
day, it is really improbable that it ever did. And the fair 
construction of the verses written to her, points to the 
supposition that the attachment was purely a poetic one, 
beginning and ending in poetry. But even assuming, 
first, that Stella was Lady Rich, next that Lady Rich 
loved Sidney criminally—most improbable considerations 
—what reason is there to drag in such a proposition in a 
life of Bacon, and in such terms as these, much more 
fitted for a chronicle of the stews ? 

“ Her children riot in the same vices. Essex himself, 
with his ring of favourites, is not more profligate than his 
sister, Lady Rich. In early youth Penelope Rich was 
the mistress of Sidney, whose stolen love for her is pic¬ 
tured in his most voluptuous verse. Sidney is Astrophel, 
Penelope Stella. Since Sidney’s death she has lived 


THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL. 


139 


in shameless adultery with Lord Mountjoy, though her 
husband, Lord Rich, is still alive.” 

In Sidney’s verse Stella walks a glorious vision, pure, 
ideal, chaste, “a thing of beauty, and a joy for ever.” In 
Mr. Dixon’s page she seems a hideous abomination. But 
Essex’s second sister, Dorothy, was a pattern wife. She 
married very young Sir Thomas Perrot. He died. She 
then married the Duke of Northumberland. He was on 
all hands a half madman. His contemporaries called 
him Wizard. Before he had been six months wedded, if 
Anthony Bacon is to be believed, he was profligately 
deserting his wife for other and older favourites. He 
behaved with an undeviating and uniform cruelty towards 
her; and her return for all this wickedness was, as far as 
we know, a correct and most unimpeachable demeanour, 
and the purest requital, if not of affection, of self-sa¬ 
crificing duty. Anthony Bacon did his best to injure her 
peace of mind by writing, while she was enceinte of her 
first child, and before she had been eight months wedded, 
an anonymous letter, telling her of her husband’s profli¬ 
gacy. Not quite three months after he writes: “ The 
Countess of Northumberland, always reputed a very 
honourable and virtuous lady, is brought to bed of a goodly 
boy, who, God grant, may resemble and inherit as well his 
mother’s and his noble uncle’s, her most worthy brother’s 
virtues, as his father’s ancient nobility.” .This was all the 
praise the panegyrist could bestow on him ; yet Mr. Dixon 
says of this lady, whom he cannot more fully defame 
if he would, “ Her sister Dorothy, after wedding one 
husband secretly, and against the canon, has now married 
Percy the wizard, Earl of Northumberland, with whom 
she lived the life of a dog. Save in the Suffolk branch of 


140 


ITS TEACHINGS. 


the Howards, it would not be easy to find out of Italian 
story a group of women so detestable as the mother and 
sisters of the Earl.” 

This is another proof of the historian’s genius. There 
is no calumny true against Lady Rich, except that she 
lived with her future husband, Lord Mountjoy, before 
she was married to him, her own husband being either 
imbecile or mad; her sister Dorothy being, for all that 
is known to the contrary, as pure and virtuous a woman 
as shines in history. 

If Mr. Lingard deserves such reprehension for narrating 
what was founded on good evidence, what must be said of 
Mr. Dixon, who creates these slanders, and then tries to 
pass them on the public ? For his attack on this patient 
and most resigned woman—this virtuous, good wife—this 
noble sister—this sad, sad victim of a revengeful, mali¬ 
cious, evil-disposed lord. That Northumberland was a 
bad man no lack of evidence exists. Through knowledge 
gained by his marital power over his wife he betrayed her 
brother to the Cecils, “ working at first upon the love and 
kindness of a wife too true and good for him ”* Some of 
the proofs of her sufferings in her letters still exist to us. 
They are wrung apparently from the heart of an injured 
and suffering woman. But Mr. Dixon is strongest in 
attacking the mother of these two ladies, Essex’s mother, 
the thrice-wedded wife of Blount. Here we again trace 
the master-mind. Here the poet rises to the heights of 
his inspiration, and to the mighty theme :— 

“ As Lettice Knollys, as Countess of Essex, as Countess 
of Leicester, as wife of Sir Christopher Blount, this mother 
of the Earl has been a barb in Elizabeth’s side for thirty 
* Henry Howard’s (afterwards Northampton’s) Letter. 


GENEROUS SELF-DENIAL. 


141 


years. Married as a girl to a noble husband, she gave up 
his honour to a seducer, and there is reason to fear! {sic) 
she gave her consent to the taking of his life. While 
Devereux lived, she deceived the Queen by a scandalous 
amour, and after his death by a clandestine marriage, 
with the Earl of Leicester. While Dudley lived, she 
wallowed in licentious love with Christopher Blount, his 
groom of the horse. When her second husband expired 
in agonies at Cornbury, not a gallop from the place in 
which Amy Robsart died, she again mortified the queen 
by a secret union with her seducer Blount.” 

This again is harsh, but not so harsh as the same 
historian’s character of Lady Compton; of course it is 
not true, perchance in no particular, perchance in some 
only; it is certainly narrated, so far as it is not purely 
imaginative, on very wretched testimony—the testimony 
of a professional libeller—of the very man whom Mr. 
Dixon has so eloquently denounced as one of those filthy 
monks. 

But perhaps we have rather to thank Mr. Dixon for 
going no further; having manufactured so much, he 
might have done much more, for he is no sordid retailer; 
he may pride himself on being “ in the wholesale line.” 
The phrase is not elegant, but will perhaps be pardoned 
for its pertinency. The imagination which has done so 
much might have done more. But having a giant’s 
strength he has forborne to use it. I may simply dispose 
of the case by stating that the incidents here stated, are 
utterly improbable and irreconcileable with the known 
facts. 

Lord Dudley left his wife and her son the Earl of 
Essex, born many years before he knew her, the bulk of 


142 


Dudley’s fame. 


his fortune; and that in terms of such affection, and 
faith, and love, as rarely find expression in a Will. As to 
her giving consent to the murder of her first husband, which 
Mr. Dixon fears (!); as to her wallowing in licentious 
love with Blount, one at least of these stories originated 
with one of those very wifeless monks; and yet, to use 
Mr. Dixon’s own words, this “ lie against chastity and 
womanhood, this monstrous lie,” some one besides a monk 
can dream, can recoin, and furbish up, and enlarge, and 
brighten, and embellish, and so pass into circulation. 

The best proof that she did not help to murder her first 
husband was that the second married her, and did not 
marry her for two years after. In fact, there is no suffi¬ 
cient ground to believe that her first husband was poisoned 
at all. The doctors did not think so. He fancied he was, as 
all men in an ignorant age did fancy they were. Sussex 
on his death-bed declared the same. It was charged 
against Dudley that he poisoned all his enemies in succes¬ 
sion, and, in fact, everybody who thwarted him in his 
career. The deaths of Essex, Chatillon, Throgmorton, 
Sussex, as well as of Amy Robsart, his first wife, were all 
laid at his door. Lady Sheffield charged him with attempt¬ 
ing to poison her; and of all the evidence her case is 
the best authenticated ; and it was also rumoured that he 
attempted the life of his kinsman Blount, and of others. 
Now these suspicions may or may not have been justly 
founded. 

Throgmorton’s death was certainly sudden and sus¬ 
picious. Lady Sheffield’s testimony as to her symptoms 
seems clear, if the evidence as to her statement—for it 
came to us at second hand—is reliable ; but the case is 
too long to go into here. But before accepting these or 


POISONING AND WITCHCRAFT. 


143 


any similar rumours of the age, we are not justified either 
in dispensing with or ignoring them, nor in accepting 
them without consideration. All testimony at first hand 
was of course as reliable in Elizabeth’s day as in our 
own. But the testimony of hearsay, of rumour and report, 
was on a very different basis. Knowledge was less per¬ 
fect ; surgical science was obscure; the causes of disease 
rarely known, in all cases its seat was absurdly assigned. 
There were no Newspapers to give authentic and written 
details. What was reported was by oral communica¬ 
tion. We know how by lapse of time and by imagina¬ 
tive rendering, verbal testimony becomes impaired. But 
even this was not all. Habits of thought were not as 
logically confined as they are even to-day. The age was 
credulous, fond of the marvellous, believed in witchcraft 
generally, was eminently imaginative. Surely all these 
circumstances should tempt us to weigh its evidence. 
Northumberland is found dead in the Tower. Straight¬ 
way Hatton is reported to have had a hand in his death. 
If Perrot dies, it is still Hatton; yet Hatton has been 
dead some time before. So, whenever a crime was be¬ 
lieved to have been committed, Leicester did it. If 
Walter Devereux died in Ireland, or Blount was wounded 
in a street brawl, or Lady Leicester {nee Amy Robsart) 
is killed, Leicester has done it. It is possible he may 
have been guilty; yet it is certain that both in Walter 
Devereux’s case and in Amy Robsart’s, every precaution 
of investigation was taken that would be taken to-day. 
Leicester was estranged from his first and boyish love ; 
but he wrote to Sir F. Blount to make every investiga¬ 
tion, to push inquiry to the uttermost, to choose wise and 
discreet jurymen, not ignorant men. 


144 


IGNORANT SLANDERS. 


Blount’s answer discloses the feeling of the time. The 
“ prejudice against Forster ”—the Tony Forster of the 
Novel of ‘ Kenilworth“ the feeling against the Earl 
would prompt the jury to find the earl guilty if they could.” 
The letters are in existence, and seem all fair and 
candid, and bear, moreover, a certain unmistakable air 
of integrity; but the Earl’s character and life have yet 
to be written. 

It is one of the commonest delusions of the uneducated 
mind to attribute uncommon powers of forecast and du¬ 
plicity, even of villany, to its enemies. Most probably 
Leicester’s haughty nature made his bitter enemies believe 
in his power; yet when we find that they recognized equally 
his power in witchcraft and in poisoning “enificii et 
maleficii reus,” we are inclined to pause at the sus¬ 
picions. But this is foreign to the matter: granting them 
true, there is not a tittle of evidence to presume complicity 
in Letitia Knollys. There is very little to criminate 
Leicester; none at all his wife. I am inclined to doubt 
even the scandal of their illicit love; yet this may have 
been. The Road murder, in our own day, will give us 
some idea of the vagaries of the imagination in cases of 
sudden death or of undetected crime. How many per¬ 
sons were in their turn suspected! what notable theories 
propounded! Suppose all newspapers suspended ; all in¬ 
formation to be hearsay ; the inquiry in the coroner’s 
court most informal; no cross-examination; the public 
still more ignorant—we shall see how easily rumours 
may have arisen, and with how little justification. 

But I speak not to disprove rumours. I merely write in 
praise of Mr. Dixon’s masterly and ingenious fabrications, 
and have only to say of his character of the learned 


POPE WITHERED. 


145 


Bishop Williams, of Lady Compton, of Peacham, St. 
John, of the two sisters of Essex, of Essex himself, Blount, 
'Lettice Knollys, of Coke, and of the rest of the characters 
who have been consigned to his hand, in his own words: 
“ What if it be a lie ; cannot a lie kill ?” 

In concluding this chapter I must dismiss my admira¬ 
tion of Mr. Dixon’s transcendant merit. He has with the 
utmost fervour attacked Pope, not for framing, or invent¬ 
ing, or creating scandals; not for begetting lies, or being 
the father of lies, but for putting a thought often ex¬ 
pressed, current in literature, in verse. Pope softened, 
if anything, D’Ewes’ character of Bacon, in calling him 
“ brightest, meanest of mankind,” for he gave him re¬ 
verence that D’Ewes did not. The term “ meanest ” was 
only relative, and not absolute—meanest among his con¬ 
temporaries. Pope was too logical to suppose any other; 
yet Mr. Dixon has very energetically denounced Pope’s 
degradation in doing so. He has done much more, he has 
written a page to prove the age was utterly vile and per¬ 
nicious. That “ the only end of its wit was defamation, and 
of its poetry was vice.” Poor, condemned, wretched age ! 
from henceforth, despised Addison, wretched Jonson, so 
condemned ! But what must be said of an age that not 
merely allows its authors to reshape lies, but to coin them 
wholesale, by hundreds—to fill a book from end to end 
with them ? Mr. Dixon may well despise such a wretched 
scandalmonger as Pope. Of Blount, of Peacham, of 
St. John, not one truth is narrated—not one on accepted 
and historic basis. Well may the noble merchant manufac¬ 
turer despise the ignoble retailer. 

I stand here, in concluding this chapter, as an unknown 

H 


146 


“LITERARY HARPIES. 


>> 


man, wrought to grief and anger by violence. As a unit 
in this great English people, having, in common with 
many others, a love of truth. I will not appeal to that* 
very small portion of the English press which, either 
through ignorance or venality, has lent itself to Mr. 
Dixon’s praise ; it is but a little, a very little blot. But I 
write in appeal to every man’s sense of truth, honour, 
delicacy, religion, virtue. What man is safe, if, after he 
has been dead some two hundred years, some carrion kite, 
some ravening wolf, is allowed to break in and pollute his 
body ? Are honour and virtue to have no safeguards ? 
Shall the holiest remains be at the mercy of any jackal of 
literature, any hungry beast of prey ? Shall every mean 
and malignant temper that can write, be at liberty to defame 
us dead? To blast our memories, honour, reputation, 
fame ? to invent scandalous and unseemly tales about us ? 
to suggest pitiful and base motives ? to reconstruct thought¬ 
less words, and give them the force of crimes ? It cannot 
be, that Literature is so despised, or men so debased, that 
such conduct- shall go unpunished. But if this is unpar¬ 
donable, infamous, against unknown men, how much more 
is it infamous, attempted against approved virtue and 
honour—against the noblest of the earth; against a Coke 
or an Oliver St. John, or an Essex ? how much more when 
lauded as virtue, and when the Press itself condescends 
to assist the misbegotten and scurrilous slander? 

With this question, to which I await reply, I will con¬ 
clude by remarking that, having only one-tenth accom¬ 
plished my uncongenial task, I will proceed, having 
cleared the ground a little, with the life of the great 
Genius, Francis Bacon. 


THE LOVER’S QUARREL. 


147 


CHAPTER VIII. 

Having brought the life of Francis Bacon, future Lord 
Verulam, down nearly to the close of the year 1593, and 
towards his thirty-third birthday, it may be mentioned inci¬ 
dentally that the Earl of Essex left court in dudgeon, on 
Friday, December 7th, and had not returned at six o’clock 
in the evening of the following Monday; which “ long 
absence hath not been these years bypast,” the court stating 
that there is strife between both parties, the Queen ever 
since the earl’s departure having been in great agitation : 
Mr. Standen’s opinion being “ that Mr. Francis Bacon’s 
case is the cause of the quarrel.'”* 

Up to the 20th day of December, Anthony Bacon 
remains in London, at which or about which time—pos¬ 
sibly on the 18th—he removes to his estate atRedburn, in 
Hertfordshire, to spend his Christmas. Up to this time, 
and all through December, Anthony has been busy as 
ever plotting and counterplotting with affairs of state, just 
as he had done in years gone by, abroad; making himself 
the master of foreign information; sending letters and 


148 


ANTONIO PEREZ. 


messages; paying spies and receiving emissaries as though 
he were a secretary of state. That busy brain in that 
frail body cannot be still. Antonio Perez, son of Gonzalo 
Perez, for forty years the sole secretary of state for Spain, 
has come over ready to sell the information of Philip II. his 
King, to Bacon. He has been discovered in a liaison with 
the Princess Eboli, the king’s mistress; has been charged 
with betraying the King’s secrets, and disgraced; and is now 
come over prepared to sell his master and betray him to the 
highest bidder. His fame has preceded him. Sir Henry 
Wotton, the English ambassador in Florence, wrote as long 
ago as August, 1592, that he had gone to England to give 
the Queen information to the prejudice of Spain, being “ a 
knave for his labour,” says honest Sir Henry. Sir Henry 
is abroad, but he will not “ lie ” abroad even for the good of 
his country.* Perez has been, like St. Paul, in dangers oft. 
Threatened with assassination, and imprisoned for his 
delinquencies. He is a bloody and a dangerous man it is 
reported, having caused John de Escovedo, the secretary 
to Austria, to be assassinated. The Queen will have 
nothing to do with such a wicked, perjured villain, who 
will sell his master ; and Lord Burleigh is with difficulty 
persuaded to even give him a conference, but the Bacons 
have no such scruples. They take him at once into their 
confidence. They make him their guest. They feast 
him and ride out with him in public. Their pious mother, 
whose prejudices against Standen were shocked by their 
favour of him, is still more moved that this vagabond 
should be consorted with, and writes in haste and dudgeon, 

* Sir Henry’s well-known definition of an Ambassador was one who 
is sent abroad to lie for his country. 


LADY BACON’S WRATH. 


149 


promptly and severely :—“ Though I pity your brother 
(Anthony), yet so long as he pities not himself, but 
keepeth that bloody Perez, yea, as a coach companion, 
and as a bed companion; a proud, profane, costly fellow, 
whose being about him, I verily fear, the Lord God doth 
mislike, and doth less bless your brother in credit and 
otherwise in his health; surely I am utterly discouraged, 
and make conscience farther to undo myself, to maintain 
such wretches as he is, that never loved your brother, but 
for his own credit living upon him.” 

Lady Ann Bacon, with all her acumen and scholar¬ 
ship, cannot see the policy Anthony Bacon is playing. 
He takes Standen and Perez to his bosom because they 
are his useful instruments. Like many women in similar 
plight, she abuses him for what she sees, not without 
reason. Anthony is still in great straits for money, 
and has applied to his mother again to make some 
sacrifice for them. Why should she undo herself for 
two such thriftless prodigals — for such a scapegrace, 
keeping such godless company as Anthony ? Poor Lady 
Ann! it is too true, and yet you are a mother, and per¬ 
force while protesting, commit the folly you so severely 
deprecate. You have already taken steps in it, and yet 
their ingratitude is past belief and very discouraging. 
These two astute men of the world, lawyer and statesman, 
do not obtain the reward of their desert. Many fools 
succeed better, nay, indeed, it is likely if they had 
been but fools they would have succeeded, and would 
not now be eating up your patrimony while you live— 
eating you piecemeal, a mouthful at a time, not the less 
surely, that there is delay between each bite. They would 


150 


THE PLAGUE IN LONDON. 


not have kept company with such rake-helly ruffians, such 
godless villains. Ah, Lady Ann! genius and great gifts 
are often a sore inheritance. 

During 1592, the Queen has visited Sir Edward Hoby, 
who lives with his mother, Lady Elizabeth Russell, Lady 
Bacon's younger sister, at Bisham, in Berkshire, about two 
miles from Henley. Sir Edward Hoby has also derived 
some genius from his mother and from her education. 
He is a distinguished orator in the Commons. He is the 
friend of the learned Camden, who thinks so highly of 
him as to dedicate his * Hibernia ’ to him. Lady Russell 
had only one son by her second husband, John Lord 
Russell, named Francis, either after his grandfather 
Francis, Earl of Bedford, or after his cousin Francis 
Bacon, most probably the former: we have seen that the 
Bacons, who were invited, were unable to attend, being 
both too unwell. There, as usual, there are masques, 
tilting, and all kinds of games. In September of the same 
year she visited Oxford; and installed in that seat of 
learning is a Mr. Henry Cuffe, Greek professor of the 
University, whom we shall meet again by-and-by. 

Her Majesty is at Hampton Court. The plague is in 
London, and in November killed a page of Lady Scroop, 
who is one of the ladies of the queen’s bedchamber. There 
Royalty will keep Christmas; so that how Francis spends 
his time this Christmas we cannot tell. The Queen holds 
revels at Hampton Court on New Year’s Day, and 
Thomas Churchyard, the poet, who is in favour now at 
court, and who is another hanger-on of the Earl of 
Essex, has been cudgelling his brains this month past to 
provide and shape verses for her Majesty’s delectation. 


churchyard’s verse. 


151 


He it is, and not Spenser, who once had to complain that 
Burleigh, who was to have given him largesse of the 
Queen's bounty, withheld it, and who wrote the verse 
found floating about the court in November— 

“ You bid your treasurer on a time 
To give me reason for my rhyme ; 

But since that time and that season 
He gave me neither rhyme nor reason.” 

Poor Tom Churchyard is no great wit. He has stolen 
the idea of rhyme and reason in antithesis from Sir 
Thomas More ; and as your apparel does not always fit 
your true thief, has not made good use of the stolen 
raiment. It is quaint old Fuller that says a man should 
measure his mouth before he steals other men’s words, to 
see if they will fit; and Churchyard, as an old practitioner, 
should be wiser in his generation. But if he is no wit 
and no poet, he is far better, he is a lucky man. William 
Shakspere, the Divine, the foremost man in all the world, 
who has created a literature that shall see the great globe 
itself roll down the steep of time before it ceases to be, 
is working laboriously for the “ groundlings ”—a Samson 
grinding corn for the Philistines; while Thomas Church¬ 
yard makes verses for royalty; is, in a sort, poet-laureate. 
Francis Bacon is not yet so fortunate as he—he is still 
under the cloud of her Majesty’s displeasure; living at his 
chambers in Gray’s Inn, where he most probably ate his 
Christmas dinner, joining in the Gray’s Inn revels on New 
Year’s day and Twelfth Night. 

At this time Gray’s Inn is the most famous of the inns of 
court, having twice as many students as the Inner or 
Middle Temple, and is very prodigal and boisterous at all 


152 


ANOTHER DISAPPOINTMENT. 


festive seasons, being in great favour with her Majesty 
for its brave shows and masques. 

In January, while Bacon sits reading, or is at his cru¬ 
cibles, a letter comes from the Lord Keeper Puckering, 
to say to-morrow the Queen will nominate officers in law, 
and that he, the Lord Keeper, not wishing that Mr. Bacon 
should be ignorant, now apprises him that he had better 
see my Lord of Essex to-morrow, Friday, the 18th. Mr. 
Francis Bacon posts off to court; but lo ! the Queen only 
nominates a judge of the Common Pleas, and a baron of 
the Exchequer, and is told by the Earl kindly, that he will 
look after his interest; that nothing will be done till 
Easter Term at least; and he will be the first to apprise 
Mr. Bacon. On Monday, the 28th, the Earl of Essex 
takes Mr. Standen aside at court, and laying his hand on 
his shoulder, tells him that he again interceded yesterday 
with the Queen for Mr. Francis Bacon, but that she still 
answered, “ on the youth and small experience ” of Mr. 
Francis Bacon. 

During this month, a Dr. Lopez, a Portuguese phy¬ 
sician, is arrested on suspicion of an attempt to poison 
Elizabeth. The Earl of Essex has made himself very 
busy therein, as his royal mistress thinks without good 
cause, calling him a “ rash and temerarious youth,” 
which so vexes the proud and hasty earl, that he shuts 
himself from her for two days. Among Bacon’s works 
will be found his account of Don Lopez’s treason, and all 
its vile purports, which, however, does not seem to be very 
important, so that this is probably one part of Bacon’s labour 
during the months of February and March. On the 3rd of 
February the Earl tells Mr. Standen to call on him at eleven 


bacon’s first great brief. 


153 


at night; and he then confides to him that Mr. Francis 
Bacon has been arguing a case (at last) in the Queen’s 
Bench, and that he has been much pleased with his argu¬ 
ments; and that the queen has been made acquainted 
with the matter, but that she has been much moved to 
appoint Sir Edward Coke to be her attorney-general, and 
to nominate Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Edward Stafford to 
be her secretaries of state. 

Lopez had been at last committed to the Tower, and 
Essex and Robert Cecil are appointed to examine him. 
They return home in a coach from that place together, 
not ill pleased with their mission, for they have discovered 
quite enough by his confession to prove him guilty. On 
their journey, subtle Sir Robert Cecil, the stiff, precise, 
high-shouldered, methodical man of business, with the 
busy, energetic, bustling, yet repressed air, and the 
compressed mouth, commences a conversation, in spite 
of the shakings and rumbling of the springless vehicle, 
with the Earl. He pauses a little, and then breaks 
out suddenly, and with an effort, “ My lord, the Queen 
has resolved, ere five days pass, without any further 
delay, to make an attorney-general. I pray your lordship 
to let me know whom you will favour.” The wily secre¬ 
tary in posse would seem to help my Lord of Essex, and as 
though he were not already aware that Essex was moving 
heaven and earth to gain the place for his client. The 
JEarl answers that he wonders at his asking such a ques¬ 
tion, 44 for resolutely against all whomsoever he stood for 
Francis Bacon.” 

“Good lord,” replies Sir Robert, “I wonder your 
lordship should go about and waste your time on so un- 

H 3 



154 


“ MONSIEUR BOSSU.’ 




likely or impossible a matter. Can your lordship show me 
precedent ?—one of so raw a youth, so unlearned in law, 
ever nominated to such a place ?” it is too true. Then the 
downright Earl, with what he imagines and afterwards 
describes to be great cunning, hut with a mere tu quoque , 
says he thinks he can give a precedent of as young a man 
seeking a greater place. Sir Robert feels the thrust, and 
says if the Earl will be satisfied with the solicitorship, that 
might be compassed, and be of easier digestion to her 
Majesty. “ Digest n^e no digestions,” says the fond and 
foolish friend, “ the Attorneyship for Francis I must and 
will have; and in that will I spend all my power, might, 
authority, and amity, and will tooth and nail defend and 
procure the same for him against whomsoever.” We can see 
the young Earl, boyish-looking still, his eyes flashing, his 
voice raised, his delicate temperament quivering with 
excitement, as he pleads and declares for his friend. Ah 
me ! so shall Bacon answer you. When he gets back, he 
tells Mr. Standen, Bacon’s friend, who immediately asks 
permission to write to Francis Bacon. The Earl gives him 
leave, but has an afterthought; tells him to call on him 
at Gray’s Inn, and say that he will himself be there and 
visit Mr. Francis after dinner, and after he has seen my 
Lord Treasurer on that subject among others. So the 
great noble, the Queen’s favourite and alter ego , calls and 
leaves Mr. Francis Bacon “extremely joyful and com¬ 
forted ” that he had so stoutly stuck out against Mr. 
Humpback, as Mr. Standen calls Sir Robert; “ Monsieur 
Bossu.” With a malignant show of courtesy, Francis 
Bacon listens to the epithet, but he does not repeat it, he 
is too wary for that. 


A STORY FROM COURT. 


155 


After the great man is gone, Mr. Standen and Mr. 
Francis Bacon pull their chairs together and talk. Mr. 
Francis tells him how much his heart is eased, and that 
he is greatly satisfied with his lordship and his noble deal¬ 
ing, and how much he and his brother Anthony were 
bound to honour and serve his lordship. Then answers 
Mr. Standen : “ It is very true they have, and the Earl 
has only one fault, he must continually be pulled by the 
ear like a boy at his lessons.” Mr. Standen has a merry 
and a sarcastic vein, and a tongue that has before this 
got him into trouble, so he speaks freely, not fearing 
much, and being of an incautious temper. Mr. Standen, 
next day, having a love for a good story, tells of a carter, 
who having been twice told to call for the Queen’s ward¬ 
robe to remove it from Hampton Court to Windsor, and 
being each time disappointed, claps his hand on his thigh 
and says, “Now I see that the Queen is a woman as well 
as my wife.” Her Majesty standing at the window, over¬ 
hears the rascal, and sends him three angels to stop his 
mouth, with a “ What a villain it is !” 

Two or three days after the journey in the coach, Lord 
Burleigh sends his own secretary, Mr. Hickes, with a 
polite message to Mr. Francis Bacon, to congratulate him 
with much joy and contentment upon the first effects of 
his public practice, and to request him to send to his lord- 
ship his case, and the chief points of his pleading, in order 
that his lordship might make report of it where it might 
do him most good. This is the advantage of good friends. 
The Lord Treasurer himself has but a poor opinion of his 
nephew’s abilities. He thinks him a dreamer, a man of 
words, an ideologist. All his writings are crammed full 



156 


THE WARDS AND LIVERIES. 


of conceits, and smack of the closet. He has never done 
anything; but the Earl of Essex will have him attorney 
and must not be denied. Hence the Treasurer’s sudden 
interest in this case. 

Anthony writes to his mother from Redburn this joyous 
news. The praters say Francis never entered into 
action. That he is a carpet knight in law. To-morrow 
he will argue a most famous case in the Exchequer, the 
Lord Keeper, and, if he is able, the Lord Treasurer, the 
two Lord Chief Justices, two other Judges of each bench, 
the Lord Chief Baron, and all the puisnes to be present. 
To-morrow, Saturday, Mr. Bacon pleads, and though it 
is half-holiday, he gains, say his friends, general ap¬ 
plause by his pleading. What say his enemies, or the 
critical young esquires (audience against their wills) of 
the utter bar, about this man who has such powerful 
friends ? Do they sigh and curse their fate, and warm 
their hands at the sea-coal tire, and think of their mise¬ 
rable lodgings and envy this young lawyer, who is nephew 
to the Lord Treasurer, and whose friend is the favourite 
of the Queen, whom they know will step over their heads ? 
Perhaps so, and utter witty and malignant jokes, as they 
do afterwards, when Mr. Francis fails in getting the 
Mastership of the Wards and Liveries, after having san- 
guinely made too sure, has dressed his servants in pre¬ 
paration for the place he is not lucky enough to obtain. 

I have said before that the Cecils hate Essex, that the 
Earl loves them not. Yet we have seen that these rivals 
for royal favour keep up all appearances of external civility. 
The Lord Treasurer is an honourable man, who will do 
nothing mean, or by stealth or fraud. His rule of safety 


A GLIMPSE AT SHAKSPERE’S POLONIUS. 157 


is prudence, caution, policy. The young Sir Robert 
thinks meanly of his father’s wit; these scruples, this 
timidity, are weak and vain signs of character. He is 
more in Iago’s vein. A well-contrived move would 
clear away these enemies with whom his father palters and 
temporises; but his day will come. The Queen leaves 
Hampton Court at last in March for Greenwich. The 
day after she is gone, Mr. Standen goes into the Lord 
Treasurer’s bedroom, and finds him there, the old grey¬ 
headed statesman, sitting solitary and musing by the fire. 
They converse on Mr. Standen’s affairs, and Mr. Standen 
confesses that he has used some intercession of the Earl of 
Essex’s. The Lord Treasurer hereupon began to start in 
his chair, and to alter from his usual wayward and fretful 
manner into a tune of choler, being touched in very 
deed. “ So my lord of Essex has helped you, has he ?” says 
the old lord. “You will do well to go to him again then : 
1 hope he may do you good and falling into a tempest of 
wrath, which Mr. Standen could by no means appease, he 
made him a low bow, and left, with the reflection that so 
long as the Lord Treasurer reigneth, may I see my fare, 
and all for following the Earl. 

From this it will be seen that to be befriended by Essex 
is to have no passport to the elder Cecil’s heart; yet did He 
—on Essex’s move—send to serve Bacon. Finding the 
Earl so earnest, Sir Robert, hungering for the secretary¬ 
ship, will go much further. At the end of this month of 
March, a new Master of the Rolls is appointed—Sir 
Thomas Egerton—who will some day be Lord Ellesmere, 
and founder of the great Ellesmere family. To him Sir 
Robert Cecil writes March 27th, 1594, the attorney and 




158 


SELF-INTEREST. 


solicitorship being both unsettled, to thank Egerton, 
who is a politic and kindly man, for offering to assist 
the inexperienced Bacon by his greater knowledge, and 
“arm him with observations;” “for the greatest suffi¬ 
ciency of wit and learning may yet need aid in practice , 
and for the kindness I thank you as much as if it had 
been done to myself. And this I dare assure you, that I 
have no kinsman living (my brother excepted) whom I 
hold so dear; but I would write more if I spake not in 
a manner for myself; for so, I assure you, in measure of 
love and affection he standeth unto me.” 

Bravo, Sir Robert! the retort has done good. It was 
a home thrust, that. The secretaryship is yet to win, my 
honoured father is getting old, and my Lord of Essex 
has great power, and has shown his hand most foolishly. 
“ He will spend all his power, might, authority, and 
amity.” “ Will he ? Then he is in earnest. I thought 
he was but making believe, to secure Anthony’s nimble 
wit and disaffected heart, rot him!” So perhaps has 
mused or muses the Petit Bossu , the day before, or 
on that very day, for Essex writes on the 28th. The 
Earl has again seen and baited the Queen, or tried to 
bait her into compliance. He writes a long letter de¬ 
tailing his suit; that he “ had dealt confidently as in a 
matter in which he feared delay not denial; that Bacon 
was much cast down by the Queen’s anger already.” “ And 
because Tanfield had been most propounded to her, I did 
most disable him.” The Queen was very reserved, “and 
grew not passionate against you till I grew passionate for 
you.” Then she said that none thought you fit for the place 
but the Lord Treasurer and myself. “ Marry,” continues 


FRIENDLY INTERCESSION. 


159 


the ingenuous earl, “some of them say differently before 
us for fear or flattery” I told her the majority and the 
wisest of her council had preferred you for the place ; that 
Bacon’s enemies had spoken factiously to her, speaking 
without witness. She said she neither was persuaded nor 
could hear of it till Easter, “ and therefore in passion bade 
me go to bed if I could talk of nothing else.” Where¬ 
fore, in passion I went away, saying, “ while I was with her 
I could not but solicit for the cause and the man I so much 
affected, and therefore I would retire myself till I might 
be more graciously heard. And so we parted. To-mor¬ 
row I will go hence of purpose, and on Thursday I will 
write an expostulating letter to her. That night or upon 
Friday morning, I will be here again and follow on the 
same course, stirring a discontent in her.” On the 30th, 
the indefatigable Earl writes again. 

“ I have now (this moment) spoken with the Queen, and 
I see no stay for obtaining a full resolution of that we 
desire.” It is to the same effect as before. The Queen shows 
signs of yielding; he will make exceptions to-morrow to all 
the competitors; the “ Huddler ” will fare badly. “ I will to¬ 
morrow take more time to deal with her, and will sweeten 
her with all the art I have to make. Benevolum auditorem” 

Francis Bacon writes promptly back. If he leaves the 
place he will be so much disgraced and disappointed he 
will retire with a couple of men to Cambridge, and there 
spend his life in studies and contemplation. “ Without look¬ 
ing back, if you esteem my future, remember the point of 
precedency. The objections to my competitors your lord- 
ship knoweth partly. I pray spare them not, not even to* 
* Query “ only to.” 




160 


NO MEANS SPAEED. 


the Queen , hut to the great ones , to show your confidence 
and to work their distrust” 

So the disparagement of rivals is a shaft out of Master 
Francis Bacon’s quiver—they are not to be spared. I 
think that Gentleman, with all his caution, would not 
stick at a pretty tale or two to undo a gentleman. 
There is now a species of praise, very honourable and infi¬ 
nitely more damnatory than condemnation. Perhaps 
Mr. Francis Bacon would like that. As, “ Yes; Mr. Coke 
is a fine lawyer, if he could only apply it; and being so 
polished a gentleman, in a place where courtesy and 
refinement are needed, is most fitor, “ Mr. Morris is, to 
be sure, a good lawyer and a most discreet traitor, who is 
very witty in defaming her Majesty, which will help him 
with the prisoners.” Fie on it, Mr. Francis Bacon ! is this 
the magnanimity thy philosophy hath taught thee ? 

Now April has arrived, and if Lord Burleigh will be 
of Essex’s opinion, and strive against the Queen for 
young Sir Robert’s sake surely the poor Queen will give 
way. On the 21st of last month, Bacon wrote to the 
Lord Treasurer, urging his suit, but with no particular 
argument that need be recited. In this he speaks of try¬ 
ing “ for the solicitor’s placewith Essex he is trying for 
the attorney’s, a much more advanced post. Is he gulling 
the Lord Treasurer, asking his aid for one post, to have his 
good word, while secretly he hopes to gain another*? or 
has he given up hope of the Attorney’s place, though Coke 
is not appointed till the 10th of April ? 

It must be presumed, however, that the latter is the 
case, and that, failing the attorney’s place, he hopes to 
win the solicitor’s with Burleigh’s aid. From this we 


Robert Cecil’s excuse. 


161 


conclude that as long back as the 20th of March, at least, 
the Queen had virtually decided against Francis Bacon 
for Attorney; that the game was up ; and that now, with 
his uncle’s aid and Essex’s, there was only the solicitor- 
ship to play for. 

Bacon is now more than thirty-three, and with all his 
powerful connections and his great pride—for which nearly 
ten years ago his uncle had occasion to chide him—his 
own tenacity and unscrupulousness, he is still resolved to 
wait on fortune rather than honourably rely on his own 
exertions. His maxim, a politic one certainly, being, that 
it is easier to be lifted into honour, than to work for it, 
and that a little ingenuity is much better husbanded in 
this manner, than in plodding labour, conscious integrity, or 
resolute faith in heaven’s justice and the triumph of truth. 
He is not cast down. So all through April we find him 
writing letters, besieging the Earl, waiting at court to see 
the Queen for the first time since the subsidy speech, to be 
denied access still, not only on his own account, but 
because his friends, the Vice-Chamberlain and the Earl of 
Essex, were at present somewhat out of favour. Mr. 
Bacon writes almost pitifully to his cousin Robert to urge 
his father to ask him to delay placing the new solicitor till 
the Earl returned to court. Sir Robert answers back that 
the favourite’s absence was a great hindrance. “ I do think 
nothing cut the throat more of your present access than 
the Earl’s being somewhat troubled at this time.” How 
wary the young man is! the delay asked will not be diffi¬ 
cult to manage. “ I protest I suffer with you in mind, but 
time will founder all your competitors.” The Earl returns. 
The Queen will have no business whatever at their first 


162 


IN LAW “NOT DEEP.’ 


interview, nothing but compliments. “ She, at the begin¬ 
ning, excepted all business.” She calls on him, and she 
will not hear of his old suit till he calls on her. So she 
playfully puts him off. She will do nothing till term 
begins, April 18. The Earl still harps on the same sub¬ 
ject. Again, in a few days, he writes, for he will give her 
no peace, poor Queen. ^ I went yesterday to the Queen 
through the galleries in the morning, afternoon, and at 
night.’’ “ I had long speech with her of you, wherein I 
urged both the point of your extraordinary sufficiency, 
proved by your last argument (in the Exchequer), and the 
opinion of all men.” 

To this the Queen answers, that the greatness of 
Bacon’s friends, or of my Lord Treasurer and Essex 
—for she excludes others—“ did make men give a more 
favourable testimony than else they would do, think¬ 
ing thereby they pleased us.” She is ready to admit 
“ that you had a great wit and an excellent gift of speech, 
and much other good learning; but in law she rather 
thought you could make show to the utmost of your know¬ 
ledge than that you were deep.” Essex replies to the 
Queen, that she has denied him so much he hopes she will 
concede this. He could bear all else, so she would grant 
him this. She thinks it fitter for him to give way than 
that she should. The Queen again will not deny, she 
cannot, her young lover. She will delay, she would think 
of it; and so it still stands. Anthony soon after writes to 
his mother, that he and Francis have determined, if the 
point is not settled in Francis’ favour by next term, they 
will trouble no further in the matter. 

Lady Ann Bacon, as we have seen, is not merely pious, 


lady ann’s piety. 


163 


but is also passionate. The distinguishing traits, like 
those in a well-known epitaph, being somewhat incon¬ 
sistent—worldly, passionate, and deeply religious, with 
a notable skill of housewifery and in the brewing of 
beer. She has been much concerned of late with her 
sons’ doings, and takes on herself to chide them roundly 
for their misconduct. Anthony Bacon has returned 
from Redburn, and has taken a house in Bishops- 
gate Street, situated near the Bull Inn, where all 
kinds of stage-plays are held. Moreover, the Lady Ann 
knows the minister of the parish, for she has conversed 
with him, and he is an ignorant man, and careless of his 
duty, a Shepherd that lets down the wall of his sheepfold, 
so that the vagrant lambs roam in and out. A parish 
with heathen stage-plays, and a minister unfit for godly 
counsel—her two innocents will indeed suffer! Moreover, 
Anthony retains with him that villain Lawson, whom her 
ladyship hates with peculiar malignance. She writes, there¬ 
fore, a very strong letter to her eldest born who answers 
back. He is grateful for her motherly affection, but con¬ 
siders her severity against Lawson a mere passion and 
prejudice springing from presumption. That she can see in 
him what no one else can ; or from a sovereign desire to 
overrule your sons in all things; concluding his remon¬ 
strance very dutifully and affectionately. 

It must be confessed that this “ saint in God,” as she 
appeared to Francis very probably, and as he has termed 
her, has a harsh temper and strong will of her own, that 
incline one little to envy Sir Nicholas in his life. The 
two brothers remain unsettled, and Francis still sues for 
the Solicitorship, still hungers and thirsts after place, 


164 


ANOTHER OPENING. 


knowing full well, sagacious man that he is, that desert 
and probity are small things, and that while honest men 
are struggling, a good fat place quietly given to an unfit 
man is a far more pleasant help to a happy and contented 
life than the mere consciousness of worth. Just as there 
are to-day two classes of men, one class that works, and 
one that is quietly pitchforked into riches and wealth, 
thanking heaven for its great deserts, so justly rewarded. 

About the 17th of June we have Mr. Fulke Greville, 
who afterwards becomes Lord Brooke, proprietor of 
Warwick Castle, writing to Mr. Francis Bacon. He 
has conversed with the Queen in favour of his friend, and 
will lay 100?. to 50?. that he will be the solicitor. Mr. 
Fulke Greville is, like his illustrious friend Sir Philip 
Sidney, six years older than Bacon, and so is near upon, 
if not quite, forty. He has a reputation at court for his 
wit; and it is said there, but nowhere else, that his poems 
are little short of Spenser’s. To do the gentleman justice, 
he does not think so, being of cheerfulness and modesty 
enough. Not being gifted with prescience, he sees not 
that his end will he bloody, and that, as we know now, 
he will die by the hand of a confidential servant 

In July there is some evidence of her Majesty’s being 
in part reconciled to him, as there is a proof in a letter of 
his from Huntingdon to her, that she had engaged him 
in some service of state, but that he had broken down, 
and was unable to complete it. It was probably of no 
great moment, and not likely to breed injury to the state 
in delay. At the end of the month it transpires that the 
Earl is anxious to be in active service again, which the 
Queen will not allow, in any lesser action than imports 


INDEFATIGABLE PLACE-HUNTERS. 


165 


her crown and state, but gives him a warrant for 4,000?. 
sterling, saying, “ Look to thyself, good Essex, and be 
wise to help thyself without giving thy enemies advan¬ 
tage ; and my hand shall be readier to help thee than 
any other.” 

In September and part of October, Francis Bacon is at 
Twickenham. Towards the end of October he returns, 
at opening of term, to argue a case in London, of 
which he apprises the Earl in order that he may be 
present. In December, on Christmas Day, the Queen, at 
the Earl’s instance, and through Anthony Bacon’s inter¬ 
cession, gives Antonio Perez 100?. land in fee simple, and 
30?. in parks, possibly for services done—possibly for 
services to come. On the 20th of January, 1594—95, 
Bacon’s hopes at last seem to draw to a fulfilment. His 
kinsman, Mr. Edward Stanhope, writes on that date that 
the Lord Treasurer has had another interview with the 
Queen in Bacon’s behalf; her Majesty ordering him to 
send for the Master of the Rolls, that she might take his 
advice, telling the Treasurer that nobody else could nomi¬ 
nate any other to the place, lest they should offend him, 
who seemed only to affect his nephew. 

Altogether the Treasurer has not a pleasant time of it; 
these Bacons are such indefatigable place-hunters. The 
Queen abuses him on one hand for having Francis’ 
interests too near. Robert wishes Bacon placed, to have the 
Earl’s favour. Anthony studiously absents himself to show 
his sense of Burleigh’s lukewarmness, nay, is even plotting 
against the old man. Francis besieges him with letters. 
The Earl worries him; and now Lady Ann herself, who for 
some time past has not failed in her sisterly letters to 
him touching the welfare of his soul, and to suggest and 


166 


LADY ANN TO THE BESCUE. 


hint his lukewarmness, in this very month of January,* 
sets on him and Sir Robert in earnest. The latter, she 
will, as usual, take to task soundly. 

The conversation opens by Lady Bacon lamenting the 
bad state of Anthony’s health. Sir Robert answers indif¬ 
ferently, that he has good parts, but that some diseases are 
hereditary, and that those he is afflicted with seem of that 
kind. Then the Lady Ann girds at the high-shouldered 
little man, her nephew, and with her usual habit “ speaks 
her mind.” The eldest of her only two sons is, it is true, 
visited by God, and that is past remedy, but her youngest— 
here she looks at Sir Robert, who tries to seem unconcerned 
—“ He is but strangely used by men’s dealing. God knows 
who are his enemies”—another glance,—“ or why.” “ He 
is the first and only young man of the same account that 
hath been so circumstanced.” Sir Robert avers that her 
Majesty’s temper is to delay, not to resolve; and he has 
no doubt his father would have been glad to have his, Sir 
Robert’s, cousin placed before this. “ I hope so myself,” 
rejoins Lady Ann, sarcastically emphasizing the hope ; 
“ but some think if my Lord had been earnest it had been' 
done.” Sir Robert then details that his father only last 
Tuesday urged the matter as term-day was so near, 
when the Queen said it was a shame no one was placed ; 
that she dared name no one for fear of offending Bur¬ 
leigh and Essex, and concluded by asking, “ Is there none, 
I pray you, but Francis Bacon fit for the place?” Lord 
Burleigh replying to this that the judges and others think 
him sufficient with your favour. Sir Robert Cecil further 
declares his father is most sincere in the matter. Lady 
Bacon then, driven from her point, suggests that he, Sir 
* January 24, 1595. 


THE QUEEN’S INDECISION. 


167 


Robert, is secretary in place , though not nominated. Lady 
Ann is the reporter of this interview to her son Anthony, 
and the good lady concludes her letter by observing 
that on the whole, Sir Robert’s speech to her upon the 
occasion was all kindly outward, and in a manner that 
showed him desirous to have her think him sincere in it. 

On the 25th, the very next day after this, Bacon writes 
a long letter to his brother. From this we glean that, tired 
of the suspense, and hoping to draw her Majesty to some 
conclusion, he is trying the threat of travelling, and wishes 
Anthony to accompany him. He has already acquainted 
the Earl of Essex of his intention, in order that the Queen 
may be apprised, and has also written to Sir Robert Cecil 
on the same subject. 

In the letter to Anthony, he conveys that her Majesty 
(very characteristically) is disinclined to his absence. 
She at all times objected to the departure of any of her 
courtiers abroad, being anxious to preserve the splendour 
of her court; if, indeed, she did not feel a maternal care in 
the welfare of all who were near her person, either by 
kinship to her servants, or who were themselves her 
servants. Thus we find her interfering in the marriage 
of even younger sons, and of persons not themselves in 
attendance on her court, as of Robert Cary with Miss 
Trevanion,* and of Peregrine Bailie, the former, however, 
related to her in a distant manner; but in all the 
private affairs of her courtiers she took as active an inte¬ 
rest as if they were simply personal to herself. Here the 
Queen’s speech, says Francis Bacon, is after this manner: 
“ Why I have made no solicitor. Hath anybody carried a 
solicitor with him in his pocket ? but he must have it in 


Nichol. Cary’s Diary. 


168 


bacon’s suspicions. 


his own time (as if, says Bacon, it were but yesterday’s 
nomination) or else I must be thought to cast him away.” 

Then her Majesty answereth thus : “ If I continue this 
manner, she will seek all England, for a solicitor rather 
than take me.” The plain English of this is, that the 
Queen is still undecided; she would not like to lose 
Bacon from her court, nor to appoint him. He is in such 
a hurry ; he must have it on the instant, though certes he 
has waited long if not patiently ; and yet she wants not to 
drive him out of England. But she will not be forced, not 
she. To this letter Bacon, with the jealous fear of a man 
who doubts not his own entire capacity, expresses some 
fear that the Queen strikes at Esses through him, being in 
temporary pique with that Earl. We who are behind the 
scenes know that if she is angered with the Earl, it is at 
his so unduly pressing the suit of his friend. During this 
month Anthony applies to his uncle Killigrew for a loan 
of 2007, in which we must presume Francis is to share, for 
he inquires in his letter to his brother whether Killigrew 
has answered. Towards the end of the month Killigrew 
does answer by denying the suit and refusing the loan. 

In the Harleian MSS. there are two or three letters 
which it is very difficult to place contained in Vols. 6996 
and 6997. By the order in which they have been placed 
they have been assumed to be of the years 1594 and 1595. 
But the accuracy of the date may in one or two cases be 
suspected from the imperfection of the caligraphy. It 
matters little to the progress of this story whether written 
in the earlier or later year assigned. It is, however, most 
probable that No. 97 was written in 1594, from Green¬ 
wich, where the Queen then was in April, having moved 
thence from Hampton Court, and that Bacon was then at 


FLEMING MADE SOLICITOR. 


169 


court. The letter 52 as well as 50 seems by intrinsic 
evidence to be attributable to the date of April, 1594, 
about the time when Coke was appointed Attorney- 
General. They contain little matter of interest except 
No. 52, which contains this passage: “ I pray your 
Lordship (the Lord Keeper) to call to remembrance my 
Lord Treasurer’s kind course, who affirmed directly all 
the rest of the candidates to be unfit.” No. 72, Vol. 6996, 
is a letter of Essex to Lord Keeper Puckering, desiring 
authoritatively that Puckering should avoid pressing for 
a solicitor till he, Essex, returns to sue for Bacon. No. 
14, Vol. 6697, attributed by Mr. Montagu to the 20th 
May, 1595, seems 1594. Many of the letters in Mon¬ 
tagu are misdated, and all are edited without order or 
arrangement. 

It is almost needless to say that Bacon did not travel, 
perhaps he never purposed such a step. At any rate he did 
not do so ; but during the whole year 1595, till Nov., 
pushed his suit energetically for the Solicitor-Generalship. 
In all quarters as vehemently, and in much the same 
fashion that he had already pursued it for the Attorney¬ 
ship. At last, in November, the Queen appointed Fleming 
her Solicitor-General, and thus four years’ labour and 
strife and anxiety of mind, since he first applied to 
Burleigh, had been thrown away fruitlessly, and two 'heavy 
and bitter disappointments encountered. The only me¬ 
morable circumstances connected with this application, 
are, that precisely as we have seen him growing dis¬ 
affected to Essex and suspicious, he, in his suit for the 
Solicitor ship, grows as suspicious of Sir Thomas Egerton, 
and, as it would seem, with as little reason. In this last 
case, however, he is imprudent enough to express to Sir 

I 


170 


OFFENCE TO EGERTON. 


Thomas, “ that your lordship * is failing me, and crossing 
me now in the conclusion, when friends are best tried,” 
and to express a sarcastic hope “ that you will not 
disable me further than is cause.”! In a similar spirit he 
wrote to Lord Burleigh in March 1594, showing that 
he mistrusted Sir Robert Cecil, and wrote a rash and 
impudent letter to Cecil, impugning his motives for 
not placing him. The two letters to Egerton, as well 
as his carriage towards him at the Temple, offended that 
gentleman, and the Earl of Essex was necessitated to 
write to him and conciliate him, as Bacon’s letters had 
been calculated to produce mischief and hinder any 
possible good. The letters giving offence to Egerton 
were written July 28th, 1595, and August 19th; the 
letter of Essex to Egerton explaining them 31st August, 
and requested Egerton to grant Essex an interview. 
That Essex’s intercession was useful we perceive by the 
altered tone of Bacon’s letters in September, which are 
more cordial, and conclude with “ Your good lordship ” 
instead of “ Your lordship,” and end with “ Your lordship’s 
affectionate to do you humble service,” in one case, instead 
of the more formal endings of July. About this time was 
written to the Lord Keeper, probably, a letter which 
unhappily bears no date, but which has been shamefully 
misused or abused in use, by a recent Editor to his own 
purposes. It is to Lord Egerton, and was probably written 
in September,^ and runs thus:— 

* Sir Thomas was Lord Keeper. 

t Letter, July 28, 1595. Montagu, vol. xiii., p. 56. 

t There is also a letter in the Cabala, June 6, 1595, reprinted by 
Montagu, vol. xii., p. 4, which I cannot assign to that year, but at 
latest to 1594. It may be called a servile letter, professing “more 
sense of obligation than of self-love.” 


ADMIRATION OF POWER. 


171 


“My very good Lord,— 

“The want of assistance from them which should be 
Mr. Bacon’s friends, makes me the more industrious myself 
and the more earnest in soliciting mine own friends. 
Upon me the labour must lie of his establishment, and 
upon me the disgrace will light of his being refused. 
Therefore I pray your lordship now account me not as a 
solicitor, only of my friend’s cause, but as a party interested 
in this, and employ all your lordship’s favour to me, or 
strength for me, in procuring a short and speedy end. 
For though I know it will never be carried any other way, 
yet I hold both my friend and myself disgraced by this 
protraction. More I would write, but that I know to so 
honourable and kind a friend this which I have said is 
enough, and so I commend your lordship unto God’s best 
protection, resting, 

“ At your lordship’s commandment, 

“ Essex.” 

This letter has been introduced for the purpose of pro¬ 
ducing the false impression that out of a spirit of patronage, 
Essex rashly undertook what he could not hope to fulfil— 
the placing of Bacon, and that failing, he was culpable. 
It is, on the other hand, but a portion of a long-continued 
series, an additional proof of Essex’s great earnestness. 

This year has seen Francis Bacon in great straits for 
money, if the letter of July 6th, 1595, is correctly 
dated in Montagu, which may perchance be doubted. 

He has yet had little or no practice. “ My life hath 
been so private, as I have had no means to do your 
Lordship service; but yet, as your Lordship knoweth, I 
have ever had your Lordship in singular admiration.” I 
think, notwithstanding, his practice at the bar has been 
increasing during these past two years, though not yet 
sufficiently to put thoughts of travel out of his head, of 
which we find him writing again in September 1595, 

i 2 


172 


MORE SCHEMING. 


using the threat apparently again to draw the appoint¬ 
ment of Solicitor to conclusion. What business he has 
had, we find from odd phrases in his letters, is chiefly in 
the Queen’s causes if not entirely so. In March, he is 
offering to Mr. Hickes his lease of Twickenham, on 
collateral security for a loan, his uncle Killigrew having 
failed in January to supply his wants; and it is pro¬ 
bably to this month of March, or perhaps to February, 
that the long letter to Egerton in the library of Queen’s 
College, Oxford,* is to be attributed. 

In this letter another opportunity is given us of stealing 
a glimpse at Bacon’s character. 

Sir Thomas Egerton, himself a politic lawyer, has 
shown himself so far a consistent friend of Bacon, reaping 
the favour of Essex and of Burleigh in consequence. In 
June of this year we see doubts creep into Bacon’s mind 
that he does not use him fairly. But prior to this he has 
written, in the letter of which I propose to give some 
extracts, that he is under deep obligations to Egerton for 
his loving courses towards him, especially in his nomina¬ 
tion of Bacon to the solicitorship, and his countenance 
and favour in his practice. 

His Lordship has suggested that he might succeed him 
as Master of the Bolls (missing the Attorneyship), which 
Egerton would vacate in his favour, and Bacon now offers his 
reversionship of the Star Chamber for Mr. John Egerton, 
son of the Lord Keeper, if the latter will help him to 
the Rolls; and that then, as the place is not presently 
valuable, that it shall be made so, by getting the present 
holder expelled for corruption ; and that Mr John Egerton 
and himself should hold the place in copartnership. In 
* Montagu, vol. xiii., p. 87. 


AN INFAMOUS PROPOSAL. 


173 


brief, Mr. Francis Bacon’s meaning is this : If Sir Thomas 
Egerton will help him, he will give him his reversion of the 
Star Chamber—which is, however, only a reversion—for 
his son. “ Which is but like another man’s ground reach¬ 
ing upon my house, which may mend my prospect but it 
doth not fill my barn.” Or if Sir Thomas is so minded, he 
will help him to make it of present value, and go share 
with young Mr. Egerton, by having the present holder 
removed for corruption. The language is so ambiguous, 
the proposal so hateful and so disgraceful, that we would 
at once wish it false, and that an error had been made of 
the ambiguity rather than that Mr. Bacon should have 
made it. To enable any person, therefore, to come to an 
opposite or a different conclusion, if possible, this part of 
the letter shall be given. 

“ And now lastly, my honourable good lord, for my 
third poor help, I account (it) will do me small good, except 
there be a heave; and that is this place of the Star 
Chamber. I do confess ingenuously to your lordship, out 
of my love to the public , besides my particular, that I am 
of opinion that rules without examples will do little good, 
at least not to continue; but that there is such a concord¬ 
ance between the time to come and the time past, as 
there will be no reforming the one without informing of 
the other. And I will not, as the proverb is, spit against 
the wind, but yield so far to a general opinion. As there 
was never a more ... or particular example. . . . But if it 
be true that I have heard of more than one or two, that be¬ 
sides this forerunning in taking of fees, there are other deep 
corruptions, which in an ordinary case are intended to be 
proved against him; surely, for my part I am not super¬ 
stitious ; as I will not take any shadow of it nor labour to 


174 


AMBIGUOUSLY FRAMED. 


stop it, since it is a thing medicineable for the office of 
the realm. And then if the place by such an occasion or 
otherwise should come in possession , the better to testify my 
affection to ymr lordship , I shall be glad, as I offered it to 
your lordship by way of surrender, so in this case to offer 
it by way of joint patentcy in nature of a reversion, which 
as it is now, there wanteth no good will in me to offer, but 
that both in that condition it is not worth the offering.” 

It is now impossible to say whether his presumption of 
Egerton’s coolness towards him arose from his guilty con¬ 
science suspecting that Egerton would not conform to his 
views. This letter could not have been written later than 
his letters of pique in June. From the tone in which he 
speaks of Egerton’s favours to him, it must have been 
written since Egerton’s rise to the Keepership in April of 
the preceding year, and with great probability may be 
assigned to February or March 1595. But this is not the 
point. If I read it aright—and a man may well be 
excused blundering when such intentional ambiguity has 
been assumed—a further probability has been suggested 
or started, of an inquiry into the Star Chamber practices. 
We know that in the last parliament such an inquiry was 
proposed. That Bacon declared vehemently against it as 
a hindrance to his prospects. He will now assist in it, if 
it will lead to the deposition of the present holder, and 
if the Lord Keeper of the great seal will help him to win 
it and to hold it in conjunction with the Keeper’s son. 
He thinks that rules without examples will do little good, 
and so for virtue’s sake, and the benefit of the common¬ 
wealth, he would like to see the man punished. He will 
not move in it, but he will not hinder it; and if the office 
is made vacant, to testify his affection he will hold it with 


OCCASIONAL REBELLION OF BLOOD. 175 

his Lordship in joint patentcy. “ Truly the serpent is the 
cunningest beast of the field, and goeth always upon 
the ground.” 

I have brought the Life of Bacon to this point, 6th No¬ 
vember 1595, when Fleming is made Solicitor-General, 
without making any comments on it, because I thought 
it fairer to place the evidence in the reader’s hands, 
that he might draw his own conclusions, than that I 
should attempt to influence him. To this point he has had 
a picture, a photograph rather, of one aspect of Bacon’s 
life. He has seen him day by day, by every unworthy 
art, by stratagem, by the basest servility, by alternate 
cringing, supplication, flattery, and threats, strive to win 
his way, without honourable labour, to a high post. His 
letters to his uncle, to the Lord Keeper, are filled with 
the basest and most fulsome adulation, the most servile 
protestations. They are, however, too numerous to be all 
printed, and I have thus been limited to parts of a cor¬ 
respondence, the whole of which would only more completely 
verify that which is now published. Bacon’s character at 
thirty-four we must presume to be formed, and in it we 
have a man unscrupulous in all arts that help men to rise. 
With consummate opinion of his own gifts, great pliancy, 
ready obsequiousness, energy in his own cause, and the 
ability to flatter, there is, it is true, a streak of rebel¬ 
lious blood in him, which makes him apt to fire on small 
provocation or occasion; and this we shall see shown 
more than once in his life. But with this exception, which 
he presently masters, his life is consistent to one end. 

Up to this point Fortune has not smiled on him. The 
Queen is prejudiced against him. She confessed to Fulke 
Greville she loved his father and would willingly advance 


176 


ELIZABETH’S DISCRETION. 


his son on his deserts. But she has nowhere professed 
her confidence or love for the son. She disparages him 
to all. To his uncle Burleigh, to Essex. She maintains 
her enmity against him on account of the subsidy speech 
obstinately and long. She has a good word to say 
for Anthony, who slights her and has not yet been to 
court. But as yet no good word of a solid kind for 
Francis. She is a keen observer of character. In all 
the role of history, no one person has given proof 
of a greater capacity to discover merit of varied kinds. 
She thinks Bacon insincere and wily. The Burleighs 
have latterly helped his advancement to serve their own 
ends. Essex has spent all his might and amity to ad¬ 
vance Bacon. But there is no alteration of the Queen‘s 
strong will. She will prefer Fleming. He is a better 
lawyer. He has had an infinitely larger practice. He is 
an older man. He is in every way suited to grace the 
place better. And again honesty and justice triumph, 
and Bacon, the needy place-hunter, is placeless. 

It can be no source of exultation, but a cause of grief, 
that Bacon is thus mean. That such contradictions should 
be in nature; and that an intense light shall bring with it 
a deep shadow. It is no business of ours to explain it. 
We must ever take nature as it is, rejecting nothing, fal¬ 
sifying nothing, mistaking nothing. If Bacon is base, it is 
sad. But if it is true, this is no concern of the historian’s. 
There is a wise end in it, full surely; and now having 
seen what baseness he has been guilty of, we will pass 
away from this long struggle for place, wearying in its 
detail, to his general life, in the second epoch of his 
career, between 1595 and 1620, when his road is of 
ascent and of glory, of fortune and unexampled success. 


THE IDEAL STATESMAN. 


177 


CHAPTER IX. 

On November 5, 1595, the Queen signed Fleming’s ap¬ 
pointment to the Solicitor-Generalship. On Nov. 17th 
the Earl of Essex gave a grand entertainment to the 
Queen in honour of her accession to the throne, in which 
Bacon assisted by writing the speeches for the Masque, 
arid in which his friend Tobie Matthew sustained a part. 
In this Masque the Statesman, one of the characters, makes 
a speech as full of wisdom and policy as the best and 
sagest of Bacon’s charges. Here are one or two passages. 

“ And ever rather let him take the side which is likeliest 
to be followed, than that which is soundest and best, that 
everything may seem to be carried by his direction. . . . 
But when his mistress shall perceive that his endeavours 
are become a true support of her, a discharge of her care, 
a watchman of her person, a scholar of her wisdom, an 
instrument of her operation, and a conduit of her virtue; 
this with his diligences, accesses, humility, and patience, 
may move her to give him further degrees and approaches 
to her favour. 

“ Did ever any lady, hard to please, or disposed to 
exercise her lover, injoin him so good tastes and command¬ 
ments, as Philantia exacteth of you ? But I will leave 
you to the scorn of that mistress whom you undertake 


178 ANTHONY BECOMES SERVANT TO ESSEX. 


to govern, that is, to Fortune, to whom Philantia hath 
bound you.” These sentiments are supposed to apply to 
Essex, but they seem rather the poetical wailings of 
Bacon’s own soul, delicately couched, it is true, but ex¬ 
pressive of his disappointment. 

In October of this year Anthony Bacon, who has been 
growing point by point more and more into the Earl’s 
favour, removed altogether to his residence at Essex House. 
His means have become desperately straitened, either 
from his extravagance, or expenses in his diplomatic career. 
And for convenience of access to the Earl, as well as for 
economy’s sake, he becomes a pensioner on the bounty of 
the Earl. His mother is sorely incensed at this. She 
wrote, in August, to dissuade him from the step, which 
he even then contemplated. “ Perad venture he may 
not be so well liked there as in his own house, because of 
suspicion and disagreement which may hurt him in these 
fickle times.” And again, on the 20th: “ You have 
hitherto been esteemed as a worthy friend, now shall be 
accounted the Earl’s follower, a base kind of good wit and 
speech. Before his servants did regard you, now you 
must respect and be in their danger to your cumber and 
charge, and care to please. Everything you do shall be 
spoken, and noted abroad, and yourself brought, as it 
were, into a kind of bondage, where now you are free. 
Standen and Lawson being there, you will be counted a 
practiser, and more misliked and suspected. God keep 
you from Spanish subtleties and popery !” 

Anthony listens perforce, but does not heed. October 
sees him a resident with Essex, a constant guest; and in 
addition to the Earl's great labours for Francis Bacon, 


THE GIFT OF LAND. 


179 


this is to be added to the sum of his favours—that his 
generosity has been sufficient to lure Anthony from his 
independence into servitude; or that his princely nature 
has so bound Anthony to him by hooks of steel, that he is 
willing even to accept the semblance of servitude for his sake. 

It has been averred that Anthony’s fortune was originally 
ample, yet his entire career seems one of involved means. 
He has long been a mere pensioner and hanger on of the 
Earl’s bounty, and in becoming an inmate of his house it 
can only be accepted, that he has become too much in¬ 
volved and too poor to live independently. 

But this is not the only service done by the Earl. In this 
very year, 1595, perhaps in October, immediately on the 
disappointment reaching Bacon, the Earl of Essex goes 
to him, and with the utmost generosity confers on him a 
piece of land, which was afterwards sold under pressure 
for 1,800/., and which may be estimated, by the coinage of 
to-day, as having been worth from 15,000/. to 20,000/. In 
consonance with the rest of the statements in the Editor of 
the 4 Athenaeum’s ’ scandalous book, this gift is perverted 
and falsified. It is said, 44 that to pay in land is the fashion 
of a time when gold is scarce and soil cheap. Nor is the 
patch too large; at most it may be worth 1,200/. or 
1,500/.” This in defiance of Bacon’s own averment that 
he sold it for 1,800/.! 44 After Bacon’s improvements and 
the rise of rents he sells it for 1,800/.” What improve¬ 
ments ? what rise of rents ? These are of the coinage of 
Mr. Dixon’s brain. There were no improvements, that 
he can tell us of. No rise of rents. But he further depre¬ 
ciates this noble and voluntary gift, the true benefaction 
of a generous mind. He says : 44 Unable to pay his debt 


180 


Essex’s free gift. 


by a public office, Essex feels that he ought to pay it in 
money or in money’s worth. The lawyer has done his 
work, and must be told his fee. But the Earl has no funds. 
His debts, his amours, his camp of servants eat him up. 
Four years have been spent in the earl's service,” &c. 

Now every line, every word of this is false—as false as 
the imputation that Essex was indebted to Bacon. As 
base as the slander that Essex would pay a private debt by 
a public gift. Essex had received no benefit whatever at 
Bacon’s hand. He had spent hours and days in his ser¬ 
vice. He had injured his own cause with the Queen. Had 
written letters innumerable; interceded with his friends; 
and at last so pledged himself in every way that he could 
not go back—all to benefit a man who could do nothing 
in return. It is absolutely false to say that he had been 
for years in the Earl’s service, as false as—the rest of Mr. 
Dixon’s book, in which only one or two accidental truths 
have crept in, in some three hundred and fifty pages. The 
slander about the Earl’s want of money is as base as the 
rest. There is no proof that he is in want of money. 
He is not rich. A man so eaten up by needy dependents, 
so at the mercy of his friends, could not be. But the 
insinuations about his amours and his debts eating him up 
are all of one fashion. This is Essex’s reward. He 
knows Bacon to be penniless, at the direst shifts for money, 
for maintenance, failing in his profession, and he gives him 
as much land as is worth more than 15,000Z. to-day. 
Can anything be nobler ? That Francis Bacon had done 
anything for Essex up to this time cannot be shown. The 
nature of their intercourse forbids it. That Essex was in 
anywise indebted to the briefless needy barrister, is simply 


THE QUEEN’S PRESENT. 


181 


absurd. The gift was a gift, pure and simple, noble as the 
heart that gave it; and we challenge any man, especially 
Mr. Dixon, who has so slandered the Earl’s memory, to 
bring one word in proof of his assertions or to justify his 
fabrications. Nor is this all; the Queen knows well 
the friendship of Essex for Bacon. She has had more 
than sufficient proof; so on the very day of the Masque at 
Essex House", to please the Earl, as a reward for his 
labours in her honour, she grants, not the place he sued 
for, but in some amends for its deprivation, the lease and 
reversion of Twickenham Park. Bacon is no longer to 
have Fleming’s place, but the Queen has before shown 
her fear of offending Essex ; so on the very day of the fete 
at York House, to grace the occasion, she gratifies the 
Earl by at least so much concession in his favour. 

Another six months roll on; Bacon, bent indefatigably 
on public office, is still a candidate for place. He has 
missed the Attorneyship and Solicitorship, now he will try 
for the Mastership of the Rolls. In place is his only hope. 
On the 8th of May, 1596, Essex is about to depart for 
the Azores. He is then at Plymouth, his hands full—the 
charge of a vast expedition, and the glory of the nation in 
that expedition, on his hands. Thus he writes to his 
secretary*:— 

“ Reynoldes,— 

44 1 know I am condemned by all my friends that I 
write either short letters or none at all to them. 4 But I 
must protest for my excuse that I am overwhelmed with 
the task I have here, which rather than I will not perform 
I will not only lose the recreation of entertaining my 
friends, but my very meat and sleep. I am busy in 

* Birch, ‘ Memoirs of Eliz.,’ vol i., p. 480. 


182 


THE EXPEDITION TO CADIZ. 


bringing all this chaos into order, in setting down every 
man’s rank and degree, that those under me may not fall 
together by the ears for precedency and place, as in other 
armies hath been seen. I am setting down the parts 
and bounds and limits of every man’s office, that none 
may pretend ignorance, if he do not his duty, nor none 
incroach upon his fellows. I am also in hand with making 
of orders for the well governing of the whole army. 
And therefore I have my hands full. But I will, when 
these great labours are overcome, make them amends 
for my silence now. In the mean time, do you plead these 
excuses for me, and especially to worthy Sir Edward Dyer, 
to whom I send my best wishes, and so rest 

“ Your loving master, 

“ Plymouth, May 8, 1596. Essex.” 

Here is a graphic picture of the Earl’s business and state 
of mind. He has, young as he is, a due feeling of his 
responsibility—a due anxiety for the mighty interests 
confided to his care, but still a thought for friendship. 
He is ordering, arranging, marshalling, full of occupation, 
of plans of discipline, but has still time to steal away a 
thought on those he leaves behind. 

While he is in Plymouth, the Lord Keeper Puckering 
is dead. Egerton is at once advanced by the Queen, 
having no doubt, on this occasion, of his fitness, and no 
favourite pleading for the appointment. In the ordinary 
course of events he would vacate his last place. This he 
does not do, for he retains it till after the Queen’s death ; 
but it opens a chance to Bacon. Puckering died on the 
80th of April. On the 6th of May* she gave the Seal to 
Egerton, “with the applause of the whole nation,” says Lord 
Campbell. On the 10th Bacon writes to the Earl f :— 

* Lord Campbell. 

f Birch, * Memoirs of Eliz.,’ vol. i., p. 481. 


A prodigal’s vows. 


183 


“ My singular good Lord,— 

“ I have no other argument to write on to your good 
Lordship, but upon demonstration of my deepest and most 
bounden duty, in fullness whereof I mourn for your lord* 
ship’s absence, though 1 mitigate it as much as I can 
with the hope of your happy success, the greatest part 
whereof, be it never so great, will be the safety of your 
most honourable person ; for the which, in the first place, 
and then for the prosperity of your enterprise, I frequently 
pray. And as in so great discomfort it hath pleased God 
some ways to regard my desolateness, by raising so great 
and so worthy a friend in your absence, as the new-placed 
Lord Keeper, in whose placing as it hath pleased God to 
establish mightily, one of the chief pillars of this estate, 
that is, the justice of the land, which began to shake and 
sink, and for that purpose, no doubt, gave her Majesty 
strength of heart, of herself to do that in six days which 
the deepest judgment thought would be the work of many 
months; so for my particular Ido find in an extraordinary 
manner, that his lordship, doth succeed my father almost 
in his fatherly care of me, and love towards me, as much 
as he professeth to follow him, in his honourable and 
sound courses of justice and estate; of which so special 
favour the open and apparent reason I can ascribe to 
nothing more than to the impression, which upon many 
conferences of long time used between his lordship and 
me, he may have received both of your lordship’s high 
love and good opinion towards his lordship, verified in many 
and singular offices, whereof now the realm, rather than 
himself, is like to reap the Fruit; and also of your 
singular affection towards me, as a man chosen by you to 
set forth the excellency and nature of your mind, though 
with some error of your judgment. Hereof, if it may 
please your lordship to take knowledge to my lord, accord¬ 
ing to the style of your wonted kindness, your lordship 
shall do me great contentment. My lord told me he had 
written to your lordship, and wished with great affection 
he had been so lucky as to have had two hours’ talk 
with you upon those occasions, which since have fallen 


184 


ANOTHER BEGGING LETTER. 


out. So, wishing that God may conduct you by the 
hand pace by pace, I commend you and your actions to 
his divine good providence, 

“ Your lordship’s ever deepliest bounden, 

“Francis Bacon.” 

With this Anthony also wrote, interceding for his 
brother, asking also for a word to her Majesty from the 
Earl in his favour. Here is the Earl’s answer, he probably 
not receiving the letter till the same or the preceding day, 
dated the 17th of May * :— 

“ Sir,— 

“ I have thought the contemplation of the art mili¬ 
tary harder than the execution. But now I see where the 
number is great, compounded of sea and land forces, the 
most tyrones (tyros?), and almost all voluntaries, the 
officers equal almost in age, quality, and standing in the 
wars, it is hard for any man to approve himself a good 
commander. So great is my zeal to omit nothing, and so 
short my sufficiency to perform all, as, besides my charge, 
myself doth afflict myself. For I cannot follow the pre¬ 
cedents of our dissolute armies, and my helpers are a little 
amazed with me, when they are come from governing a little 
troop to a great, and from . . to all the great spirits of 
our state. And sometimes I am as much troubled with 
them as with all the troops. But though these be war¬ 
rants for my seldom writing, yet they shall be no excuses 
for my failing industry. I have written to my Lord Keeper 
and to some other friends, to have care of you in my 
absence. And so commending you to God’s happy and 
heavenly protection, I rest, 

“ Your true friend, 

“ Plymouth, May 17, 1596. Essex.” 

Was there ever such a hero ?—so generous a friend, so 
modest withal; not three words on his labour for Bacon. 

* Birch, ‘Memoirs of Eliz.’ vol. i., p. 487. 


ESSEX WRITES IN BEHALF OF BACON. 


185 


“I have written to my Lord Keeperno further flourish 
than that. Is it any wonder that ballads are sung for him ? 
that after his death the nation mourns his loss ? that Bacon 
is threatened with assassination ? Is it any wonder that 
Elizabeth, with her keen vision, takes such a man into 
her heart of hearts, with all his faults of temper, hardi¬ 
hood, and petulancy ? “ He is in haste ; he will omit 

nothing.” Yet has he thought of every follower and de¬ 
pendent, writing to his steward, Mr. Gilly Meyricke, who 
afterwards follows him to the block, and who as a brave 
soldier, is afterwards knighted at Cadiz. And now he 
writes for Bacon, to Francis, to Anthony, to Egerton, to 
Lord Buckhurst, and to Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of 
the Exchequer. Where is there another commander of 
armies bent on great enterprise, borne down by cares 
of state, who would step aside to do such service for a 
man from whom he can profit nothing, who will profit him 
nothing, but, like Judas, betray him ? The letters to these 
great lords we will give, for they are brief and to the pur¬ 
pose. Here is a letter to the Lord Keeper Egerton :— 

“My very good Lord,— 

“ I do understand by my very good friend, Mr. Francis 
Bacon, how much he is bound to your lordship for your 
favour. I do send your lordship my best thanks, and do 
protest unto you that there is no gentleman in England 
of whose good fortune I have been more desirous. I do 
still retain the same mind; but because my intercession 
hath rather hurt him than done him good, (this is a jealous 
phantasy of the Earl’s,) I dare not move the Queen for 
him. To your lordship I earnestly commend the care I 
have of his advancement; for his parts are never destined 
for a private, and, if I may so speak, an idle life. That 
life I call idle, that is not spent in public business; for 


186 


LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION. 


otherwise he will ever give himself worthy tasks. Your 
lordship, in performing what I shall desire, will oblige us 
both, and within very short time see such fruit of your own 
work as will please you well. And so, commending your 
lordship to God’s best protection, I rest at your lordship’s 
commandment. 

“ May 17, 1596.” 

To Lord Buckhurst he writes:— 

“ I do, both for private and public grounds, wish Mr. 
Francis Bacon (to the Mastership of the Rolls) before all 
other men. I commend his cause to your lordship, not as 
his alone, or as mine, but as a public cause, wherein your 
lordship shall have honour.” 

To Sir John Fortescue:— 

“ If your labour (in hastening Mr. Francis Bacon) pre¬ 
vail, I will owe it to you as a particular debt, though you 
may challenge it as a debt of the state.* 

With such reasons, such strong argument, as only the 
warmest heart, the most generous and self-sacrificing 
nature could suggest or urge, Essex departs for the wars. 
His last thoughts for his friend, for the needy Barrister 
of Genius, whom he believes, in his honest nature, doubt¬ 
less, as noble as wise, as good as gifted, and whom he, if 
there is gratitude or honesty in man, will deserve well of, 
by every act of friendly patronage that a noble generosity 
can prompt. There is no stint in language or in intent; 
and being so generously contrived, we will hope that in 
this case the return will be adequate, and that virtue will 
not merely be “ its own exceeding great reward,” but will 
be met by a solid and substantial gratitude. 

* The letter already printed from the original draught in the Queen’s 
College, Oxford, Arch. D. 2. Dugdale’s Baronage, vol. ii., p. 438, should 
most likely come in here, instead of 1594, as placed by Montagu. 


THE CADIZ FIGHT. 


187 


CHAPTER X. 

We have followed Bacon’s fortunes to the departure of 
the Earl of Essex to Cadiz in 1596. There the Earl 
gained golden opinions from all sorts of people for his 
generalship and worthy conduct, no less than for his 
courtesy and magnanimity among his foes. The injury 
wrought on the Spaniards and on the Catholic cause by 
the expedition was incalculable. It was the return visit 
for the Armada. The Spaniards had descended on our 
coasts, and we returned their courtesy, but with a very 
different effect. 

On the 20th of June the fleet landed at Cadiz Bay. 
On a burning summer’s day, early in the morning of 
Monday, as men in England are returning to their weekly 
labour, fire and smoke, and the furious din of battle are 
heard resounding far and wide over that calm expanse of 
water reaching from Rota, or the Port St. Mary (El 
Puerto) to Cortadura. The action first commenced at 
sea under shelter of the forts, the Lord Thomas 
Howard, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Robert Southwell, Sir 
George Carew, in four of the Queen’s ships commencing 
the fight. The crews of the Spanish ships being beaten, 


188 


THE ATTACK. 


fled to shore, laying a train to blow up their own ship 
the ‘ St. Philip.’ The ‘ St. Thomas ’ having been taken 
before. The ‘ St. Matthew * and ‘ St. Andrew,’ ships of 900 
to 1000 tons, were captured by the English, with all their 
ordnance and stores on board, the whole fleet, to the 
number of fifty-seven sail, “ all of them great ones,” being 
burned, taken, or destroyed. At two on the Sunday 
afternoon, Essex landed with 3000 men, to march on 
Cadiz, Howard, Raleigh, and Southwell following with 
800 men. The Earl was attacked before they came 
up, but repulsed the enemy, and marched smartly on 
the town, entering the town with wonderful bravery, 
himself being one of the foremost. “The town was 
exceeding strong, and full of men, strengthened with a 
great castle and several forts; and, in fact, each house 
in the town was like a castle.” After the entry the fight 
grew very hot in the market-place, streets, castle, and 
forts. Before ten o’clock next day the Earl’s ensign was 
on the top of the castle, and the Lord Admiral’s bloody 
flag on the top of the fort next the sea, called the Port 
Philip. 

This is the Lord Admiral Howard’s own account, writ¬ 
ten to his father-in-law, Lord Hunsdown, and, says that 
noble gentleman: “ I can assure you there is not a 
braver man in the world than the Earl of Essex is; and I 
protest, in my poor simple judgment, a grave soldier, for 
what he doth is in great order and good discipline per¬ 
formed. 

“This was all performed, and all things quieted in 
twenty-four hours to God’s glory, and her Majesty’s 
honour and renown. 


ealeigh’s quarrel. 


189 


“ The King’s loss is thus great: First, the loss of his 
ships, which was a great part of his strength; then the 
goods laden into them from the Indies, confessed to be 
worth eleven millions ; the like whereof was never seen at 
one time before. If the merchants had not burned their 
ships by command of the Duke of Medina, we should have 
gained two millions more. The mercy and clemency 
which hath been showed will be spoken of through these 
parts of the globe. No cold blood touched; no woman 
defiled; but have been with great care embarked, and 
sent to St. Mary’s fort. All the ladies—which were many 
—and all the nuns and other women and children, have 
been suffered to carry away with them their apparel, 
money, and jewels, without being searched.” 

After burning the town the army again embarked with 
great regularity. 

In this expedition came to a head—for there was an 
innate antagonism in their character—the quarrel or 
enmity between Essex and Raleigh, Essex wishing to 
pursue his advantages further, to hold Cadiz, to attack the 
Indian fleet, to assail the enemy in her other forts, and 
wait for the carracks returning with merchandize from 
beyond seas. In all these Raleigh, the Lord Admiral, 
and Sir Francis Vere thwarted him, the opposition being 
attributed by Essex to Raleigh. With this signal ad¬ 
vantage and victory, the fleet returned home. 

During the Earl’s absence, Cecil, who had been so long 
trying for the post of Secretary of State, but who had 
been opposed by Essex, obtained it on the 5th of July. 
We have seen how he pushed Francis Bacon’s suit to gain 
the Earl’s countenance, but Essex’s fatal weakness of 


190 


eobert Cecil’s rise. 


sacrificing himself for his friends was again seen. He 
had determined to gain the post for no less worthy and 
historical a personage, than Sir Thomas Bodley, founder 
of the Library at Oxford named after him, which was 
opened in 1602. This important post which, to gratify 
the Queen’s favourite, had been no doubt kept so long 
open, was now in his absence filled. From this point 
dates Essex’s downfall. Cecil is his determined and insi¬ 
dious enemy. The game is for power, and Cecil is the 
more masterly player. From this day forward the Earl 
never gains his old ascendancy. His star declines. And 
though for some years all the same tokens of outward 
favour remain, yet the Queen thwarts him in his dearest 
wishes and hinders his best schemes. In a matter, not 
of state policy, but of mere whim and caprice, of preju¬ 
dice founded on passion, or of reason based on suspicion, 
it will be impossible to say how Elizabeth’s fatal enmity 
arises. That it is nursed and cherished by Cecil, no man 
knowing his character can doubt. That it ends in Essex’s 
ruin we know. How step by step, or point by point, her 
jealousy is aroused, whether by insinuations of Essex’s 
ingratitude, of his slighting allusions to her personal 
attributes, as asserted by Raleigh, or by fear of his 
growing popularity, can never be known, for it was locked 
in an inscrutable Bosom. 

In the year 1597 Bacon published his Essays, on the 
basis, and after the example, doubtless, of those of Mon¬ 
taigne. This was his first great or successful literary 
work; and its importance must rather be estimated by 
the extent of subsequent popularity than by any extraor¬ 
dinary Literary value these effusions possess. They were 


THE ACCIDENTS OF TEMPER. 


191 


good enough to extend the Author’s reputation as an 
elegant and polished writer, as a profound and speculative 
thinker. They were not good enough to lift his name 
from obscurity to that pinnacle of fame on which it 
now rests, or to distinguish Mr. Francis Bacon vastly 
from the crowds of great men by whom he was sur¬ 
rounded. 

In the same year a parliament was called, and again 
Bacon was called to sit. He will never more mar his 
career by rash or tempestuous courses, nor hinder himself 
from promotion by independence. The Subsidy speech 
was a bitter lesson which he will never repeat. Hence¬ 
forward, as indeed from that very day, or from the day 
he wrote his first letter in 1580, to solicit a place, to 
Lord Burleigh, he will be a pattern courtier. That 
unlucky Subsidy speech was a mere slip—an accident 
sorely repented, an error of judgment, hastily made, like the 
letters to Cecil and Puckering, proceeding from that part 
of his mothers suspicious and fretful temper which he 
inherits. That good lady grows more and more querulous, 
and her letters to Anthony and his replies become more 
and more bitter and recriminatory. She suspects all. Will 
have the greatest caution ; will trust no one. Burn, burn, 
is at the bottom of every epistle, though it is of the most 
harmless description. Francis Bacon inherits with his 
father’s general placidity a shade of the maternal suspicion 
and fretfulness. It was a fit of temper, an accidental 
twinge of gout perhaps, that caused that Subsidy speech. 
His orations henceforth are temperate, courtierlike, and 
for his private weal. His reputation as an orator has 
grown high. For public business in committees, espe- 


192 


INCLOSURE AND DEPOPULATION. 


cially in legal business, no man’s name stands better. Per¬ 
haps few are so distinguished. He is nominated on almost 
every committee. His position in the House is proved 
by the fact that he is almost the first—the first on any 
really important business—speaker of the session, open¬ 
ing on the 5th of November with a speech on the de¬ 
population of towns and the increase of enclosed lands 
for tillage and pasturage. His purpose being to intro¬ 
duce two bills on the subject. 

This depopulation of towns has been a growing evil now 
for many years. The country in parts is becoming a waste ; 
and all the writers of the day abound with references to this 
apparent desertion of the country, and abandonment of 
the rural districts for the city. The bills proposed doubt¬ 
less have her Majesty’s sanction, possibly are brought 
forward at her instance by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
Sir John Fortescue follows Mr. Francis Bacon. The com¬ 
mittee is appointed, Bacon’s half-brother, Sir Nathaniel, 
and his cousin Sir E. Hoby, sitting on it among others. 

His arguments on the subject are not particularly 
striking, nor is his speech generally worth reporting; here 
is an extract or two :— 

“ Inclosure of grounds brings depopulation, which 
brings, first, idleness ; secondly, decay of tillage ; thirdly, 
subversion of houses, and decay of charity and charges to 
the poor ; fourthly, impoverishing the state of the realm.” 
This is not unlike Dogberry’s famous charge, in all humility 
be it spoken, for idleness, decay of tillage, and subversion 
of houses, certainly lead to the impoverishment of the 
realm. 44 And I would be sorry to see within this kingdom 
that part of Ovid’s verse prove true, 4 Jam seges ubi Troja 


ANOTHER RECANTATION. 


193 


fuitso in England, instead of a whole town full of people, 
nought but green fields—but a shepherd and his dog.”* 
On bills—“ For the relief of the poor,” and “ For the 
erection of houses of correction,” against “'Forestalled and 
regrators,” “For husbandry and tillage,” and several 
others—he sat in committee. 

The bill “ For the erection of houses of correction” was 
the first establishment of these now important institutions, 
and of workhouses in each county. 

On the 15th of November, or ten days after, Bacon 
shows once and for ever that he is not a factious servant 
of her Majesty; that his former Subsidy speech has sat 
heavy on his soul; and that he will now make recantation. 
An extraordinary subsidy is demanded for the Queen, but 
no thought of the poor and distressed yeoman, or of the 
unhappy and impoverished husbandman intervenes. This 
time Bacon’s song is in another key. He rises first after 
Sir Robert Cecil. He will not enter into laudation of 
her Majesty, because no breath of his can set forth her 
virtues worthily, and because her Majesty doth bestow her 
benefits like her freest patents, without hope of return. Her 
Majesty demands not treasure to lavish “ upon sumptuous 
and unnecessary triumphs, buildings, or like magnificence, 
but upon the preservation, protection, and honour of the 
realm.” The treasure which you bestow “ is but a vapour 
which riseth from the earth, and gathereth into a cloud, 
and stayeth not there long, but upon the same earth falleth 
again; and what if some drops of this do fall upon France 
or Flanders, it is like a sweet odour of honour and repu¬ 
tation to our nation throughout the world.” 

This speech is one of the best, if not the best, of his 
* D’Ewes, p. 551. 


K 


194 


A GOOD COUNSELLOR. 


parliamentary orations that have descended to us; more 
perspicuous, shorter in its sentences, and less encumbered 
in style. Part of it is marked by unusual vigour, by 
terseness, and condensation more approaching that brevity 
and fulness of matter which he afterwards attained so 
eminently in some of his writings, and which, on the tes¬ 
timony of Hawley, in his later years he so much affected. 
He alludes to the great triumph over Spain, to the seizure 
of Calais by Spain, to the great Irish ulcer eating its way ; 
how we have heaped scorn upon the Spaniard, ravished a 
port out of the very lap and bosom of his country, brought 
him to such despair that he fired his Indian fleet, in 
sacrifice as a good odour and incense to God. 

His oratory undoubtedly wrought in his behalf. He is re¬ 
ceived again into favour; and from this time to the Queen’s 
death he became a frequent visitor at court, his repute 
growing and increasing as his great Patron’s waxes low 
and declines. 

Just before parliament opened, viz. Oct. 4, 1596, he 
wrote a long letter of advice and remonstrance to the 
Earl, full of wise counsel, and pregnant with weighty and 
judicious knowledge, based on the keenest observation of 
men, of public affairs, and of women ; but chiefly of one 
woman, that woman being her Majesty. He puts it to 
the Earl whether his, Bacon’s, fortune is not comprehended 
in his, and whether he has not suffered thereby. He has 
advised the Earl already to devote to one end which will 
suffice, rather than many. “Martha, Martha, attendis 
ad plurima, unum sufficit.” Win the queen. 

Wise in counsel, he proceeds to give his patron weightv 
advice, for his guidance and consideration. He sets up 
the Earl’s image as one likely to be dangerous to the 


bacon’s sage advice. 


195 


Queen, to fright her by its appearance. “ A man of a 
nature not to he ruled, that hath the advantage of my 
affection and knoweth it, of an estate not grounded to his 
greatness, of a popular reputation, of a military depen¬ 
dence.” “ I demand whether there can be a more dan¬ 
gerous image than this, represented to any monarch living, 
much more to a lady, and of her Majesty’s apprehension. 

“ And is it not more evident than demonstration itself, 
that whilst this impression continueth in her Majesty’s 
heart you can find no other condition than inventions 
to keep your estate bare and low, crossing and dis¬ 
gracing your actions, extenuating and blasting of your 
merit, carping with contempt at your nature and 
fashions ; breeding, nourishing, and fortifying such instru¬ 
ments as are most factious against you ; repulses and 
scorns of your friends and dependents, that are true and 
stedfast; winning and inveigling away from you such 
as are flexible and wavering; thrusting you into odious 
employments and offices to supplant your reputation; 
abusing you and feeding you with dalliances and demon¬ 
strations, to divert you from descending into the serious 
consideration of your own case; yea, and perchance ven¬ 
turing you in perilous and desperate enterprises.”* 

If Bacon had not already had assurance of such be¬ 
haviour in the Queen, and if he were not, to some extent, 
in this, making a post facto statement, its denunciations 
look so like prescience as to be worthy of being con¬ 
sidered prophecy. But here he spoke wisely and warily, 
as a man who noted every storm that blew at court. Who, 

* This letter from the ‘ Resuscitatio,’ p. 106, is printed in Montagu, 
vol. xii., p. 181. I have followed Mr. Montagu’s punctuation, but in 
either, it is most difficult to read and understand, and is so long as to 
extend over several pages. 

K 2 


196 


WORDS OF WISDOM. 


by a straw, would tell you more than others by a falling 
house. As a philosopher he is keenly observant in all 
things; profound in deep deductions ; sensitive by his 
fears, and cautious to every omen and presage of mis¬ 
chief—of the stuff to make a Mazarin, a Wolsey, a 
Richelieu even. The ruler of a king, if he have but a 
little heart, a little bowels for suffering humanity. But 
the day which is to see him Prime Minister never comes. 
Though he will ride hard by, and go nigh the haven, yet 
the winds adverse, will beat him back. 

He proceeds. Essex is a clumsy flatterer. Not that 
Bacon would insinuate that any one does or could flatter 
the Queen, that were indeed impossible ; but when Essex 
attempts honest praise, men read formality in his coun¬ 
tenance : whereas your lordship should do it familiarly, 
et oratione jida. He suggests that Essex shall appear 
to emulate Leicester and Hatton, her old favourites, and 
so appear in the right way. That he should always seem 
to pursue something weighty and important with eager¬ 
ness and desire, which he should drop, instantly the Queen 
expresses her knowledge and dislike ; as, for instance, 
in recommending any one to an office (we have seen this 
is not Essex’s fashion). And Bacon thinks his lordship 
should depart, or pretend to depart, on journeys to Wales 
and the like, or even a distant excursion (though this may 
be an occasional device only), which, on the Queen 
expressing her displeasure, he should forego. The theo¬ 
retical statesman being so perfect in his art, as to con¬ 
descend, even to the advice of the Earl, in his mode of 
dress, his habits, gestures, &c. 

Then as to the Earl’s military fame. He has enough 
for the present. Let it stand. The Queen loves peace. 


THE THEORETICAL STATESMAN. 


197 


She does not like expense. Besides, expense makes 
greatness suspected. He is sorry the earl has taken the 
Earl-marshal’s baton since his return. It savours of military 
greatness. The Queen is suspicious on this head. She 
will have no rival in the people’s favour about her throne. 
He thinks the privy seal would have been much better. 
It is the third person of the great officers of the crown. 
Next, it hath a kind of superintendence over the secre¬ 
tary (and when that secretary is the little hunchback, 
Sir Robert Cecil, Mr. Bacon, it behoves a man to be 
careful. Wary Mr. Bacon !). It is an affinity to the Court 
of Wards, and therefore has both pow r er and profit in 
the Realm; it is a fine honour, a quiet place, and worth 
a thousand pounds a year. It is not martial, for Bacon 
would have Essex affect to be a statesman rather than a 
warrior, to be feared by the Queen ; and would enable 
some other warlike man to be brought into the counsel, 
some friend of the Earl, who will not be looked on as 
a rival, or with fear, and who will be as a scapegoat. 
Excellent, Mr. Bacon ! 

Mr. Bacon leaves his great charge till last. This is 
on popularity—the breath of the swinish and wavering 
multitude. This should be quenched in words, and exist 
only in things. And, therefore, to take all occasions to 
the Queen, to speak against popularity and popular causes 
vehemently, and to tax it in all others; but, nevertheless, 
to go on in your honourable commonwealth courses as 
you do. Popularity is a good flower obtained, as the Earl 
has obtained it, by noble means, but must be delicately 
handled. It is a posy which suits not royal nostrils if 
brought too near. 

Finally, let the Earl be more economical. Change some 


198 


FIRST COURTSHIP. 


of his officers. Seem careful of his estate; and, with one 
pregnant and weighty piece of advice taken to his bosom, 
Mr. Bacon will conclude. That to be favourite is no 
harm, but let her Majesty have another favourite who 
shall appear so before the people; the Earl is safely 
enshrined; but the reputation hinders real power. So 
let some other favourite be placed, but not to the Earl’s 
hindrance. Oh, no! 

This is state wisdom indeed ! This is the fulness of 
Bacon’s intellect! Advice worthy to be followed. But, 
alas! who ever followed good advice ? “ If to do were as 

easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been 
churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is 
a good divine that follows his own instructions.” Therein 
is Bacon’s only weakness: he gives it, when he should 
know that it will not be followed—that he will never train 
the wild vine Essex to run in a garden. “ A hot temper 
leaps o’er a cold decree,” and this he should know too. 
Yet Essex’s friendship suits him ; besides, he loves him as 
well as he loves any man, himself excepted, and Essex can 
still be useful. In three years the rising barrister can do 
without, nay, can then afford to despise and make mouths 
at him; but for the present he is necessary. Mr. Francis 
Bacon is in love, not necessarily with a lady’s person, but 
with her purse. Avowedly with his cousin, the daughter 
of Sir Thomas Cecil, eldest son of Burleigh, and the widow 
of Lord Chancellor Hatton. He may love the lady, but it 
is not likely. She is a notorious shrew. But she has an im¬ 
mense fortune. All other ventures have failed, perchance 
matrimony may retrieve all. Bacon is now thirty-six years 
of age, and the heyday of his blood is passed. He is, as 
we know, politic and wary, and is more likely, from his 


BY DEPUTY. 


199 


temper, to woo the lady for her money than from mere love. 
If he pleaded in earnest, perchance he would win, but he 
does not, and his wife falls into the arms of old Sir 
Edward Coke, a widower with six children, ten years 
older, of a sour and cross-grained temper, and so given 
up to law, as his sole mistress, as to be a sorry com¬ 
panion for any wife. Bacon does not do his wooing as 
if he were in earnest, or in any energetic sort. He will 
bring, as usual, the weight of his connections’ and friends’ 
influence, to bear, not from despair of his own merit, or 
from self-disparagement, but because he well knows the 
policy of a friend at court and of a powerful name. So, 
as in all else, he commands—for to ask is to command— 
the pen and advocacy of his earnest friend, Lord Essex, 
his advocate for the Attorneyship and Solicitorship and the 
Mastership of the Rolls. The two first places were other¬ 
wise bestowed, the last is still held by the original pos¬ 
sessor. The lady will not be gained. Essex’s suits do 
not prosper. There is a blight of misfortune on the Earl. 
’Tis often so. But he writes, and, as ever, does his best. 
Bacon asks “ for several letters to be left with me dor¬ 
mant, to the gentlewoman, and either of her parents: 
wherein I do not doubt, that as the beams of your favour 
have often dissolved the coldness of my fortune, so in this 
argument, your lordship will do the like with your pen.”* 

Essex writes to Sir Thomas Cecil, the lady’s father:— 

“My dear and worthy Friend,— 

“ Mr. Francis Bacon is a suitor to my Lady 
Hatton, your daughter; what his virtues and excellent 
parts are you are not ignorant. What advantages you 
may give, both to yourself and to your house, by having 

* Birch ; Hawley’s ‘ Kesuscitatio ‘ Life of Bacon,’ vol. iii., p. 195. 


200 


THRIFTLESS PURSUIT OF FORTUNE. 


a son-in-law so qualified, and so likely to rise in his pro¬ 
fession, you may easily judge. Therefore to warrant my 
moving of you to incline favourable to his suit, I will only 
add this, that if she were my sister or daughter, I protest 
I would as confidently resolve to further it, as I now per¬ 
suade to you.” 

Can anything be more generous, earnest, or to the pur¬ 
pose? It is as wise as well meant. To Lady Cecil he 
also writes, protesting he would rather match a daughter, 
if he had one, “ with Francis Bacon than with men of 
far greater titles.” The fair young widow, with all her 
wealth, has so little regard for such a wooer, however, that 
she runs away, to avoid the match, with Sir Edward Coke, 
the “ Huddler,” with his six children and his crabbed 
manners, and makes him as miserable for the rest of his 
life as he deserves to be. For he, like his rival Bacon, has 
little love for the lady, but much for her money. 

He is still, in other respects, a feeder on the Chameleon’s 
dish—the air. “ Promise crammed.” A hanger-on of the 
court; seeking preferment; and the years 1597 and 1598 
disclose many letters and applications, all to the same 
effect, humbly praying for place. In one to the new- 
made secretary we gain the first inkling of his treason 
to Essex, mildly insinuated, and with his usual cunning 
indeed, but still conveyed. “ If his letter is shown, it 
will appear to pay tribute rather where it is due, than false 
to any.” “ It is his (Essex’s) luck still to be akin to such 
things as I neither like in nature, nor would willingly meet 
with in my course, but yet cannot avoid, without show of 
base timorousness or else of unkind or suspicious strange¬ 
ness.” (Essex is going down, Robert Cecil has gone up.) 

[Here there is a hiatus in the copy.] 

“ And I am of one spirit still. I am like the 


AN INKLING OF TKEACHERY. 


201 


Galenists that deal with good compositions” (like you, 
Sir Robert) 44 and not the Paracelsians, that deal with 
these fine separaters” (as Essex and the queen, to wit); “and 
in music I ever loved easy airs that go full all the parts 
together” (this is written in 1598, when the Queen and 
Essex are at loggats), 44 and not these strange points of 
accord and discord. I write honestly and morally, natu¬ 
rally desiring the good opinion of any person, who for 
fortune or good spirit, is to be regarded. Much more with 
a secretary of the Queen’s ” (’tis best to be plain, Cecil will 
not be befooled), “and a cousin-german, and one with 
whom I have ever thought myself to have some sympathy 
of nature, though accidents have not suffered it to appear.” 
(Cruel fortune!) 

And now in this very year of 1598, in the month of 
September, a climax comes to Bacon’s woes—of want of 
place, of money, and of a wife. He is taken prisoner for 
a debt; not surely, as Lord Campbell thinks, on account 
of the miscarriage of his marriage, for that has heen lost 
these eighteen months, but because creditors have limits 
to their patience as well as other men. Like Sheridan, he 
is seized for debt; perhaps it has the same effect on his 
mind. The bailiffs’ polluting fingers fret him. He 
writes, on the 24th September, 1598, from a sponging- 
house in Coleman Street to the Lord Keeper and to Sir 
Robert Cecil, Secretary of State. He has been scandalously 
used. Sir Robert will perforce resent a wrong offered to 
his blood. Besides, he was on her Majesty’s service ; 44 and 
the rascal vaunted that he could have taken me two days 
ago, only that I was dining with the sheriff; so Sheriff 
More stands higher with these knaves than the queen.”* 

* Hatfield Collection of State Fapers, and printed in Montagu, 
vol. xii., p. 276. 

K 3 


202 


A TURN IN THE WHEEL. 


The Lord Keeper Egerton, he hopes, will bring the knave 
to his senses. The sum is three hundred pounds. “ He 
would have taken me to prison, had not Sheriff More 
gently recommended me to a handsome house in Coleman 
Street, where I am.”* And now again, perhaps on this 
very rebuff, Bacon thinks of going abroad; of giving up 
the law altogether; of travelling. He is weary of the 
Queen’s luring him on, “ like a child following a bird.” 
It is now more than twenty years since he first kissed her 
hand, going into France; and he will never have a 
greater grief than to abandon his first love ; yet he cannot 
face his disgrace, and he hopes her Majesty will not take 
his motion to travel in offence. But Lord Burleigh is 
sick, and at the point of death ; and young Sir Robert 
Cecil, the secretary, has gone to France; and, perchance, 
who knows? another turn in the cards may bring some 
fortune. So Bacon does not give up the law; on the 
contrary, he is soon (it is always the darkest the hour 
before day) to reap great reputation by a most learned 
argument in the Exchequer Chamber, in Chudleigh’s case,t 
“ an argument,” says no less an authority than Lord Camp¬ 
bell, “ equal to that of Blackstone, in Perrin v. Blake ; one 
of the most masterly ever delivered in Westminster Hall.”J 
In the meanwhile, too, if he can but stave off pecuniary 
evils, his profession is growing more lucrative, increasing 
in value: the Queen turns her face more lovingly to her 
old favourite’s son, “ her young Lord Keeper,” and, if he 
will but wait and hope, Fortune herself, tired of so many 
buffets, will turn, and, with her usual fickleness, pursue 
him as eagerly as now she obstinately avoids him. 

* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 275. 

t Lord Campbell, vol. ii., p. 297. 1 1 Rep. 120. 


DEVEREUX’s DESTINY. 


203 


CHAPTER XI. 

We draw now towards the close of the career of the 
great Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex—Bacon’s 
undeviating friend and patron, who trusted in him when 
all the world looked coldly on his great gifts; who had 
injured himself, to serve Bacon, with the Queen; who had 
out of his poverty enfeoffed him with land of great value 
—a free gift; who had helped him to win his wife, had 
Bacon but seconded his friend’s efforts; and who now, 
as Bacon foresaw, and precisely as Bacon had predicted, 
has run his course. The Queen having precisely in the 
manner indicated become jealous of his popularity, “ of 
his military bearing,” has thwarted him in all his under¬ 
takings, and at last, out of his ambition and rashness, 
made her lover and favourite a desperate and despairing 
man. 

For the purpose of considering the relationship better 
between Essex and Bacon, we will commence here with the 
year 1601, the month of February—the date of the Essex 
Plot—and consider the Earl’s treason retrospectively. 

On the 8th, being Sunday, while all the citizens are 
proceeding quietly to church, there is a riot heard along 


204 


THE ESSEX INSURRECTION. 


Fleet Street; a violent commotion, and a body of armed 
men, more than two hundred in number, surges on, headed 
wildly by the Earl of Essex—once the proud Commander 
of the united armies of this great country—now the leader 
of an attack of rabble soldiery in the streets of London. 
This wild tide of men, among whom are many Knights of 
name and fame, who have won their spurs in Parma’s 
dykes, and in perilous encounter in the Low Countries 
with the hateful Spaniard, and for the honour of Mother 
Church, bear on right past St. Paul’s—the haunt of the 
money-changer and the man of fashion—St. Martin’s le 
Grand—where dwell the makers of gold and silver lace— 
right through the ward of Chepe; past Guildhall, till 
they arrive at the house of one Smith, a sheriff, who had 
promised aid to the cause, but who now denies it. 

The Earl has cried out that his life is in danger; his 
men have worn their throats hoarse in shouting for their 
noble leader, for the Queen, for Essex, Death to the 
Spaniard ; but there has been no response. The citizens 
have gathered together in disturbed knots; some have 
treated it as a street brawl; others have timidly gone 
home to barricade their houses; in parts there is great 
confusion and uproar; the soldiers are called out, it 
is certain, and occupy the ground about St. Paul’s, by 
the bishop’s orders; but while all kinds of rumours pre¬ 
vail, this insurrection by the most popular man in England 
—the mad trick of a disordered mind—is dead in its 
birth; for “ such divinity doth hedge a king, that treason 
can but peep to what it would.” But the narrative is being 
unduly precipitated. 

Qp the banks of the Thames—then running a pellucid 


ESSEX HOUSE IN THE STRAND. 


205 


and silver stream between wooded banks and some of the 
finest gently undulating sylvan scenery in England—the 
various noblemen hold their town houses. London burns 
wood, and the Thames is pure and dotted with innumer¬ 
able boats ; the noble mansions on its banks, with their 
sloping lawns, looking out on a scene of picturesque life 
and beauty which kings might envy. Here Raleigh lives 
at Durham Place; there he spends sleepless nights, a 
very Cassius, lean and discontent, and preyed on by 
ambition; and here also is that very York House where 
old Sir Nicholas Bacon died ; and which Ben Jonson has 
so well described, and which his son hopes some day to 
possess. Here, twenty years hence, under the inspiration 
of wine and good cheer, Ben Jonson, the soldier poet, will 
sing in praise of the happy genius of the place. Of that 
outward prosperity, which seems to betoken happiness; 
but of which philosophy tells us, it is but rarely the ac¬ 
companiment. 

Hard by is Essex House, seat of the Earl of Essex. 
Before the house runs a terrace ; below this terrace there 
is a lawn with flowers, with water-stairs for landing and 
departing by the river—by the translucent stream that runs 
through the heart of a city nobler than Venice in its men 
and chivalry; and whence have departed so many grand 
adventurers, so many Argonauts to that magic new 'world. 
The house is in part Elizabethan, has a square court-yard, 
surrounded by the sleeping-chambers, inhabited by the 
numerous retainers of the proud and expensive Earl; and 
below is half a barrack, filled with men who by their 
uncouth gestures and violent and turbulent manners, show 
that they are dangerous men, who have seen service, grow- 


206 


THREATENED TREASON. 


ing swarthy under foreign suns. Of mixed races, Flemings, 
Scotch, Welsh, and even Irish among them; but with an 
unusual proportion of knights and gentlemen. From this 
house the eye stretches down the river to old London 
Bridge, the church to St. a Becket on its centre; its 
arches covered with houses and shops; its buttresses 
ponderous and heavy ; and admitting, so close are they 
together, the passage of nothing much larger than the 
Queen’s barge. Upward the eye takes in St. James’s 
Palace, the great tilt-yard, and Wolsey’s palace at White¬ 
hall. 

The city is walled; the merchants are a people distinct 
from the nobles. The nobles hold a diminished feudal 
state, and their houses represent the castles of their an¬ 
cestors. Here, within the last few days, the Earl of 
Essex has been collecting together a vast number of 
turbulent and factious persons—Puritans and Catholics, 
alike persecuted, and alike with common injuries and 
common wrongs, making common cause against oppres¬ 
sion, For some months past the talk at Essex House has 
been bold and turbulent. Messengers and emissaries 
have gone to and fro to Ireland. Correspondence is held 
with the Scotch court, which is known to be disaffected to 
the English queen. Robert Cecil, the busy little dark 
man, with his indefatigable energy, and his zeal for 
business, is as well informed of the doings of Essex House 
as the Earl himself, nay much better. The Earl’s secre¬ 
tary, Cuffe, is noisy and turbulent in his talk; and there 
be enough men to bear the Earl’s secrets to the wily 
secretary, if there were no other means of communication. 
But Cecil has cherished and nurtured this cockatrice, 


THE CRAFT AND SUBTLETY OF FOES. 


207 


egg, with hope that this mad earl may at last, with rope 
enough, hang himself. 

The earl has collected within the last few days, Sir E. 
Lyttleton, Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy, Sir Henry 
Carew, Sir Ferdinando Georges, Mr. Parker (called Lord 
Monteagle), Sir Charles Danvers, Lord Cromwell, Sir 
John Davis, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of South¬ 
ampton, Lord Sandes, Sir H. Lynley, Sir Robert Vernon, 
and several other gentlemen of known family and reputa¬ 
tion, younger sons of distinguished houses, as E. Throg¬ 
morton, Mr. Temple, Mr. Charles Ogle, Mr. Bromley, 
Mr. Christopher Dorrington, Mr. Francis Tresham, 
Robert Catesby, Christopher Wright, and others; of 
these a very small proportion, about ten per cent., not 
more, are Catholics; probably the Catholics among the 
leaders bear a large proportion. Out of sixty-six persons 
committed to the various prisons, at least fifteen are 
persons suspected of Catholic leanings. The chief num¬ 
ber are mere soldiers who follow the earl’s cause from 
affection to their leader, and who are ripe for any cause 
which will breed adventure and pay. News has daily, and 
of late almost hourly, been conveyed by the obsequious 
Cecil, and by Lady Nottingham, who is in attendance on 
the Queen, to her Majesty, of Essex’s doings. The day 
has changed from that when Essex was first in his 
Sovereign’s heart. He is now first in her hate. She hates 
him as bitterly as she once loved him. Cecil has helped 
about this consummation ; so have Lady Nottingham, and 
Sir Walter Raleigh, and Lord Cobham ; but Essex’s 
own rashness, and want of tact and temper, and Cecil’s 
spies, have done much more. 


208 


THE ROYAL WRATH. 


Raleigh avers that his rival’s turbulent and unruly 
tongue pronounced her Majesty crooked in mind as in 
body; a speech, perhaps, thoughtlessly whispered in a 
friendly ear. This, with additions, has been reported to 
the Queen. Men say the wily fox, Sir Walter, has done 
the Earl this good service. Whether it is true or false, 
it is probable. Whether the Queen became first jealous 
of Essex’s growing power, fearful of his ascendancy— 
precisely as Bacon had predicted — or whether she 
suffers the bitter pangs of despised beauty, or of affec¬ 
tion which she conceives slighted, it would be hard 
to say. She now more than dislikes—she hates Essex. 
Yet in her bosom, neither wavering nor inconstant 
when once reached, there lurks still for the Earl 
.more affection than ever existed for any other of her 
subjects. It matters little whether any criminal love 
existed between Essex and the Queen. I am inclined to 
think there did not. There had been much licence of 
affection ; but possibly nothing more. The point matters 
little here. All contemporary testimony proves that 
Essex at one time stood higher in her Majesty’s purely per¬ 
sonal favour than any other of her favourites. Leicester » 
had gained greater ascendancy, but that early connexion, 
violently tinged with passion as it once seemed, gave 
place to subsequent indifference. 

Essex was in many respects a happy contrast with 
the conventional Courtier. He was a sufficient contrast 
with Elizabeth herself to be complementary. While all 
others were self-seeking and selfish, he alone was open and 
generous. While others were stealthy, and secret, he was 
confiding and candid. He had his mother’s generosity 


THE QUEEN AND ESSEX. 


209 


and impulsiveness about him ; her hereditary impetuosity 
and loving nature, in the noble Devereux blood. Elizabeth 
had become cautious, secretive, and wary. She was vain, 
had been sensuous, but age had brought a wisdom not to 
be deeply snared, by pretenders to passion, though gratified 
by their praise and adulation. She pitied Essex’s rashness 
and inexperience ; she was wise enough to be his friend 
and guardian. His father had died in her service. The 
young man, ambitious, impetuous, affectionate, with warm 
impulses, and a love of whatever is intellectually worthy 
of honour and reverence, no doubt loved his Queen 
devotedly, for her wisdom, her learning, her great gifts, 
her princely bearing. Perhaps he at first warmly requited 
her affection by love, or by a passion more ardent than 
her own. That she was much older—more than twice his 
age—is of little moment. Young men’s love is always 
for matronly beauty. She was his Sovereign. 

His senses may have been, as a boy, dazzled by her mag¬ 
nificence ; but there is no reason to suppose that her love 
for him was reciprocated long. He was a bad dissembler, 
bearing his likes and dislikes on his face. With such a 
nature, bent on serious enterprise, generally absorbed in 
business, and in the dreams of ambition, it is but reason¬ 
able to presume him honest, and believe that he once loved 
his Queen. She was wise enough with her great gifts, with 
her Queenly nature, spite of follies and weaknesses, to 
be loved and honoured by any man. But the tide has 
now turned that once bore him on to fortune; it is setting 
out rapidly, and it will presently leave him, like a waif, a 
prey to the laws of flotsam and jetsam, stranded on the 
slippery salt ooze ; when the evening sun setting red, shall 


210 


ELIZABETH’S COURAGE. 


rise on him no more; but where a storm rising in the 
night shall dash him to pieces, amid darkness and wailing 
of winds and sudden oblivion. 

Being apprised by his eager and bitter enemies of his 
many taunts, his evil speeches, his rash demeanour, his 
turbulent and seditious meetings; of the Jesuits thronging 
about his person ; of the disaffected Puritans, who re¬ 
cognize in him their leader and protector, Elizabeth 
looks calmly on, but will have this young man guarded 
and watched. He had better beware; for though not 
splenetic nor rash, being roused, the lion is not more 
dangerous. At last, on Saturday, news is brought to the 
court, that some of the earls, and lords, and knights named 
are assembled. That the concourse is greater. That 
there are active preparations as if for an expedition ; and 
that stores, and arms, and food have gone in. That money 
has been raised ; and that the talk has been open of an 
attack on the Queen’s palace, Cuffe having even used 
threats of the Earl’s intentioa The Queen has no fear. 
She despises alike the occasion and the cause. She knows 
the men. She knows her own strength. But she will send 
ambassadors to see what is doing at Essex House. No 
spies, but Statesmen, openly. To caution the young man 
so rashly rushing on his fate. To see what he purposes, 
and if wise counsel will do it, prevent him from being 
the agent of his own undoing. To-morrow, as the matter 
is urgent and must soon come to a head, she will send 
the Lord Chief Justice Popham ; Sir William Knollys, her 
chamberlain and comptroller of her household, and a 
relative of the ill-fated Earl; the Earl of Worcester, 
and Sir Thomas Egerton the Lord Keeper, the highest 


AMBASSADORS APPOINTED. 


211 


subject in the realm, who is in two or three years to 
be Earl Ellesmere, to Essex House, to demand the griev¬ 
ances of the Earl. So, early on the gray and gusty 
February morning, before the citizens stir out to church, 
these noble gentlemen in state, with various retainers at 
their back, and a man bearing the mace, set out for 
Essex House. They arrive there soon after ten, the 
bells even now clanging out from every steeple, from 
Westminster to Bow. The porter at their summons looks 
out, and seeing these lords in great state and circum¬ 
stance, with the seal borne before them, sends to the 
captain of the guard. The captain, a good soldier, but 
factious and turbulent, and of no great discretion, is 
perplexed on the instant what to do. But after much 
consultation, messages sent to the Earl, a great deal of 
confusion heard by those on the outside, who grow im¬ 
patient at the long delay, the Queen’s commissioners are 
admitted with great caution and suspicion. Their ser¬ 
vants, pressing in behind, are peremptorily forced back 
and shut out. 

The judges find themselves suddenly in presence of a 
large concourse of armed men, chiefly English, with a 
small admixture of Welsh, Scotch, Irish, and Flemings. 
These are all, more or less, turbulent and excited, but 
restrained by their commanders. In the midst of the 
court-yard, and surrounded by the soldiers, are the young 
Earl of Rutland, son-in-law of Essex ; the young Earl of 
Southampton, bound to him in kinship, but still more 
in amity and love ; Lord Sandys; the crafty Lord Mont- 
eagle; Sir Christopher Blount, father-in-law to Essex; 
Sir Charles Danvers, and several other knights and per- 


212 


THE EMBASSY. 


sons unknown to the judges, but who immediately and. 
clamorously press forward upon the Chief Justice and his 
companions. 

The Lord Keeper Egerton opens his business. He 
has been sent by the Queen to understand the cause of 
this their assembly, and to let them know, all of them, 
that if they have any cause of grief or honest complaint 
against any person whatsoever, it shall be heard, and 
they, the claimants, shall have justice. Then the Earl, 
who, still in bad health, looks pale and wan, but who 
flushes with his strong excitement and passion, cries out 
in a loud voice, without periphrasis or even the courtesies 
due to the Peers, that his life has been sought by his 
enemies. That they have plotted even to murder him in 
his bed. That they have set her Majesty’s face against 
him, and compassed his destruction. That he has been 
cruelly and perfidiously dealt with. That his hand had 
been counterfeited and letters forged in his name to in¬ 
jure him with the Queen. That he had been denied access 
to meet his accusers and explain his wrongs; that he had 
been imprisoned and exiled from the court without cause ; 
and that therefore the Lords, his good friends and kins¬ 
men, were assembled there to protect him and to defend 
their lives and persons; for being friends of his, they too, 
had been denied justice and grievously injured, his 
noble friend, the Lord Southampton, having been set upon 
by the Lord Grey and his servants in the street, and 
assaulted. The Lord Chief Justice, whose tone is in strong 
contrast with the Earl’s, mildly and resolutely, and with 
judicial gravity, declares, that if the Earl himself, or the 
noble lords his friends, have any such matter of grief, 


ITS RESULT. 


213 


as is now for the first time declared, or as they aver them¬ 
selves to have, or if any danger to their persons is com¬ 
passed, if the Earl will at once declare who are their 
enemies, her Majesty shall be informed, and he does not 
doubt that lawful justice will be done, no matter who is 
concerned. 

The Earl of Southampton here interrupts the speaker, 
and says that Lord Grey has not been yet punished 
for his assault upon him ; to which the Chief Justice 
replies, “ that he was imprisoned.” Upon which the Lord 
Keeper Egerton begs the Earl to state his grievances, 
which shall faithfully be conveyed to her Majesty. 

At this point there arises a great clamour among the 
soldiers and serving-men, who have all this time been 
pressing on the counsellors, and who now cry out, “ Away, 
my lord! they abuse you; they betray you; they undo 
you ; you lose time.” Then the Lord Keeper, putting on 
his hat, as the whole of the lords have so far stood un¬ 
covered, says with a loud voice, and standing on his 
dignity of judge, “My lord, give us audience privately; 
here we are disturbed ; ” and turning to the mob, said, “ I 
command you all on your allegiance, lay down your arms 
and depart. You are here violating the law, and will be 
punished; and if you be good subjects, as ye say you are, 
you will depart at once, at my command.” Then the mob 
immediately make an uproar to drown the speech of the 
Lord Keeper. The Earl of Essex, puts on his hat and 
turning hurriedly (his followers attending him) into the 
house, the soldiery and rabble pressing upon the counsellors 
as they attempted to follow ; some of those on the out¬ 
side crying out, “ Kill them, kill them! ” The Earl went 


214 


THE IMPRISONED JUDGES. 


up into the great chamber of audience, his followers and 
the counsellors attending; the mob standing about the 
doorway in the court-yard, and under the windows, and 
crying out, “ Kill them, kill them! Cast out the great 
seal! Throw it out of the window!” while others cry out, 
to keep them fast in prison. The Earl passed through his 
room into his inner chamber, the judges still following 
and closed the door, putting the key in his pocket as if he 
purposed to speak with them privately. But having secured 
the door, showed an intention to depart ; and although 
stopped by the Lord Keeper for a moment, requesting 
them to be patient as he would return in half an hour, 
quitted the chamber, leaving them there and placing a 
guard upon them of Sir John Davis, Owen Salisbury, and 
Francis Tresham. 

Here they remain, it being now nearly eleven, till 
four in the afternoon, alternately parleying with Davis 
and begging and demanding their release in the name of 
the law and of the Queen, and exposed to the menaces 
and threats of the noisy multitude. Salisbury, the captain 
of the guard, being incited thereto by his men, who are 
clamorous, talks noisily of putting the Lord Chief Justice, 
Egerton, and Knollys to death, and even commences and 
makes show of piling up shot with a view to assault the 
place where Sir John Davis is on guard. 

The three gentlemen, hearing the clamour, are in no 
great spirits; and Egerton seems to think that their last 
hour is come. The Lord Chief Justice rises from his 
seat, and says boldly that it is but a little shortening of 
life, and for himself he is content, so that he dies doing 
his duty and in the Queen’s service, a post as honourable 


THEIR CRAVEN DELIVERER. 


215 


to a judge as to a soldier; but at the same time sees that 
Davis, standing outside the great chamber door, with the 
rest, have their muskets charged and the matches in 
their hands, and that the shot has been placed nearer, 
apparently with design. 

Presently Sir John Davis enters, and says he intends 
no harm, and the Lord Chief Justice Popham says, proudly, 
his hairs are gray ; his life is little worth ; and he fears no 
Knaves’ threats. 

There is a wild commotion and hurried running to and 
fro; and rumour enters with busy tongue and a hare’s 
heart; and some say that the Earl is miscarried, and some 
that he is slain, and some that the Queen is wounded past 
recovery, when presently and in haste, with fear on his 
craven face and in trepidation, there comes in abruptly 
Sir Ferdinando Georges, the governor of Plymouth. 

The Chief Justice is again seated, and looks frowningly 
on the unmannerly intruder, but says little. Georges proffers 
to liberate the Chief Justice. He answers that he will not 
depart without the rest. They entered together,—together 
in freedom, and without molestation or disturbance, they 
shall depart, or, if need be, die. The craven knight was 
not prepared for this. He believed the Chief Justice would 
clutch at life and escape, as he himself would have done. 

Georges declares there are many men, and that they 
are thirsting for the prisoners’ blood. He will be their 
safeguard. He will, though it is a post of danger, 
bear the Chief Justice through; life is sweet: he dare 
not, for fear sake, take them all, but he will return 
for the rest. The Chief Justice answers imperturbably, 
he will not leave without his brothers. The Lord 


216 


THE CRY IN FLEET STREET. 


Keeper here, with Ivnollys, now add their entreaties to 
Georges’. At last the audience is over. Georges will risk 
the enmity of the Earl. He will liberate all, if the Chief 
Justice will plead for him with the Queen. It was against 
his will and desire that he was led into this. 

While this is taking place within doors, the Earl having 
committed the defence of his house to Sir Gilly Meyrick, 
his steward, sallied forth, with about two hundred men im¬ 
perfectly armed; “ having only swords, with their cloaks 
on their shoulders.” In their passage towards the City 
Gate (Temple Bar) they were joined by Lord Cromwell, 
the Earl of Bedford, and others. Entering within the 
City, the Earl raised his cry, “ For the Queen! For the 
Queen ! A plot is laid for my life !” As the citizens, dis¬ 
turbed by this unusual commotion in the streets, poured 
forth to gaze upon him, he charged them to arm them¬ 
selves ; “ but not one of the whole City, though it was 
then very full of men, well exercised in arms, and greatly 
devoted to him, appeared in his favour.” Arrived at Mr. 
Sheriff Smith’s house, the Earl, from the excitement and 
haste with which he had marched, as well as from his pre¬ 
vious ill health, was so bathed in perspiration that he 
was compelled to change his apparel. 

In his course from one end of London to the other the 
Earl has not gained an adherent. The proclamation, 
and the prohibition of the sermon at Paul’s Cross, have 
kept the streets clear. If a popular rising ha& been in¬ 
tended, nothing more absurd has, in fact, ever been at¬ 
tempted. The Queen’s ministers, thoroughly informed on 
all points, have effectually quenched the rebellion ere the 
light could be applied. Mr. Sheriff Smith, on whom the 


THE STREET FIGHT. 


217 


TSrl, in his credulity, or on false instructions, has de¬ 
pended, receives him most coldly. That worthy citizen 
prefers his own safety. If he has, in an idle or boastful 
mood, threatened or talked treason, he is in no humour 
now to substantiate his threats. He seeks an ignoble, 
but preferentially a more certain security in flight, quitting 
the house by a back door soon after the Earl’s arrival, 
and going directly to the lord mayor. In the mean time 
Thomas Lord Burleigh, Robert Cecil’s eldest brother, 
with the garter king at arms, the Earl of Cumberland, 
and Sir Thomas Gerard, the knight marshal, were pro¬ 
claiming Essex 44 a traitor” through various parts of the 
City. The Earl, apprised of this, rushed forth with great 
perplexity and confusion in his countenance, crying out in 
the streets that England was going to be given up to the 
Infanta of Spain. He vainly hopes thus to excite the 
citizens—to arm. The attempt fails. His little band, 
seeing the ill success of their leader, are melting away 
like a snow-flake. News is brought that the Lord High 
Admiral himself (Howard Earl of Nottingham), at the 
head of certain troops, is making that way. The game is 
up. With barely a hundred dispirited adherents, what 
can the Earl hope to do ? He resolves at once to return 
home, and then, if possible, make terms with the privy 
♦councillors, his prisoners, for audience with the Queen. 
But fortune is against him this day. She who once 
pursued him so resolutely, has shunned him now for ever. 

Arrived at Ludgate, a company of soldiers dispute his 
passage. They have been posted there by order of the 
Bishop of London, under Sir John Levison. He has been 
deputed to give no egress, and to defend his post. The 


218 


THE DEFEAT. 


Earl thereupon drew his sword, which had been sheathed, 
and called on his henchman Blount to lay on. Like a 
faithful feudatory, a bold soldier, and a brave adherent, 
Blount obeys. There is a melee. In this, Blount slays 
his man. One Waite, “a stout officer,” who had fought in 
the Low Countries, and who, tradition says, was once en¬ 
gaged by Leicester to assassinate Sir Christopher. Con¬ 
sidering Leicester’s reputation, the report is not un¬ 
natural, but the story wears an air of mythic unlikelihood. 
It savours too much of the poetry of retributive justice to 
be probable. But whether or no, Blount strikes and spares 
not, is wounded in return, and taken prisoner. A gentle¬ 
man named Tracy, of good family, and a great favourite 
of the Earl’s, is also slain. Essex receives a bullet through 
his hat. Finding it impossible to force his way, either at 
this juncture or during the fight the craven knight, Sir 
Ferdinando Georges, bent on his own safety, begged per¬ 
mission to liberate the prisoners confined in Essex House. 
So runs the story. More probably, he departed without 
permission to free them, and make terms for himself, or 
falsely construed a doubtful answer. For the same narra¬ 
tive afterwards declares Essex’s surprise at their libera¬ 
tion—a point barely consistent, with a previous order for 
their enlargement. 

The little band has now shrunk to less than fifty men. 
With this force it is impossible to force the way. The 
leaders therefore determine to retreat to the river side, 
and there embark for Essex House. They take boat 
at Queenhithe, and arrive at the Earl’s residence in 
safety. Here, to the Earl’s inexpressible grief and dis¬ 
appointment, he finds his last plank kicked away, his 


THE SIEGE OF ESSEX HOUSE. 


219 


last card struck from his hand. That fortune has played 
him false. The councillors have flown, and the cage is 
empty. Resolve is thereupon made to burn all dangerous 
papers and fortify the house for its defence. 

In the City the great Cecil faction, the most powerful 
family organization perhaps ever combined, has assembled 
in force. The lords of the privy council have all met, 
with their retainers and followers. The Lord Admiral, 
the Earls of Cumberland and Lincoln, the Lords Thomas 
Howard, Grey, Burleigh, Compton, Effingham, Cobham ; 
the knights Sir John Stanhope, Sir Robert Sidney, and 
Mr. Fulke Greville (afterwards Lord Brooke), unite, 
and march on Essex House, the Lord Admiral in com¬ 
mand. Disposing his troops skilfully, he proceeds to in¬ 
vest the house on all sides. Everything being prepared 
for a storm, Sir Robert Sidney is deputed to summon 
the besiged to yield. Southampton, from within the 
walls, asks, “ To whom ?” To their enemies! “ This 

would be, indeed, to throw themselves on destruction.” 
To the Queen! “ This would be to confess themselves 
guilty.” 

“ If the Lord Admiral would give hostages for their 
security, they would present themselves to her Majesty. 
If he would not, they would fall like soldiers, being all 
agreed to die rather than yield.” 

The Lord Admiral is no less resolved. He will grant 
no terms to rebels. He will neither propose, nor give 
hostages; but as he does not war with women, he will 
give permission to the Countess, Lady Rich, and their 
women servants to depart. 

Alas! it is woman’s lot to weep, while man works; 

L 2 


220 


THE OLD LORD’S COUNSEL. 


who shall not say that it is the harder fate ? Throughout 
that fearful day, now drawing, amid the conflict of the 
elements, to a stormy close, the faithful, loving, injured 
wife of the Earl, whose devotion has been rare even 
among the chronicles of woman’s virtue, has been sitting 
amid her children in that unhappy house. Once Sir John 
Davis came to her, and asked her to see the prisoners, to 
sit with them, as they grew alarmed at their confinement; 
to ask them to eat, because the stout Chief Justice has 
declared “he will eat none of my Lord of Essex’s meat, 
not he.” Dutiful and obedient ever, she has gone down 
and sat amid those grey-headed sages and wise judges, 
only asking, “ With what comfort can I go amongst 
them?” With what comfort, indeed, among strangers, 
prisoners, amid such excitement, with her husband’s life 
being forfeit that day! 

Now she and her fiery sister-in-law, Lady Rich, who, 
with all her loveliness, is a bad consoler in trouble, 
being passionate and depressed by turns, and all the 
sad bevy of matrons, pass out of the gate into the 
darkness, and the men within fortify the place again, 
having an hour allowed them by the courtesy of the 
besiegers. 

Before this hour has elapsed, the Earl and Lord Sandys 
have resolved to force their way out. Lord Sandys is old 
and grey-haired. He has but a little time to live. He is 
for the boldest counsels, they are ever the best. He will 
die like a gentleman sword in hand, and not like a felon 
on the scaffold. But even this is hopeless. What can 
two, or even ten, do, against a host ? and this scheme is 
abandoned. Wavering and in despair, the Earl then de- 


SURRENDER ON CONCESSIONS. 


221 


termines to surrender on conditions, to which proposal the 
Lord Admiral returns the same answer as before—“ He 
will neither receive nor make terms with rebels.” 

The besieged then pray three concessions:— 

1st. That they should be civilly treated. 

2nd. That their cause should he justly and lawfully 
heard. 

3rd. That Mr. Ashton, the (Puritan) minister, might 
attend the Earl in prison for the comfort of his soul. 

The two first of these requests the Lord Admiral at 
once accedes to. For the last, he will intercede with the 
Queen. Then the gentlemen fall on their knees and de¬ 
liver up their swords; and thus at ten o’clock at night 
ends the Essex Plot. 

So ends the maddest blow ever struck at the peace 
and security of a kingdom. So ends a gathering—a 
conspiracy it cannot be called—an insurrection, which 
seems to have had no plan, no hope, no intention from 
the beginning. The Earl of Essex—the great Earl, the 
kinsman and lover of the Queen—is at last brought to his 
knees. He is now swiftly on his road to the scaffold. 
The fates ply unceasingly the shuttle, but the thread 
woven in is of the colour of blood. Francis Bacon, the 
once penniless, friendless lawyer, sleeps well that night. 
Perchance he dreams of a Queen’s growing favour, of a 
Chancellor’s seal, of a Wolsey’s seat. In the dark and 
gusty night, the wind howling about that proud seat of 
the Devereux, a boat puts off, which rows swiftly across 
to the Archbishop’s palace at Lambeth. It contains the 
unhappy favourite and Southampton, his faithful friend. 
The night is too stormy to take them to the Tower. But 


222 


THE PASSAGE TO THE TOWER. 


presently, ere they are to bed, comes a messenger from 
the Queen, who will have them at once borne swift to 
the Traitors’ Gate, in a barge. And so,, in the darkness 
of midnight, amid the howling of the elements, pass 
Southampton and Essex to the state prison, whither some 
of their fellows have been borne before. 


THE CLOSE OF THE DRAMA. 


223 


CHAPTER XIL 

The “ Great Elizabethan Age” is drawing to a close: the 
soldiers, warriors, and statesmen will be succeeded by 
great divines, but neither by men of the same mettle nor 
of the same weight. The tide is at the turn, but it is hard 
to trace its greatest height. * The trial of Essex will serve 
as well as any landmark which the historian can suggest. 
He is one of the last race of feudal courtiers; indebted 
more to birth and the accidents of fortune than to pro¬ 
fessional training for his great position. It will be the last 
great trial at which the same assemblage of wit and 
genius, wisdom and courage may be found. A brilliant 
historian two centuries after will trace with magic pencil 
and in glowing lines the occasion which shall draw 
together in Westminster Hall the greatest painter, the 
greatest scholar, the greatest historian of their day— 
the majestic Siddons, the courtly Reynolds, the erudite 
Parr. But how poor and insignificant was the opportunity 
compared with this, and what would not Macaulay have 
written had his great argument been more worthy his 
pen! Never such an audience graced a trial before; 
never in the tide of time could such men be found, such 
women assembled together. Out of the thousands assem- 


224 


THE GREAT PRISONER. 


bled a hundred are heroes. There are women who have 
sat to the great artist for Imogen, for Miranda, for Desde- 
mona, for Isabella. There are men who are the types of 
Prospero, of Coriolanus, of Hotspur, of the noble Moor, of 
Shallow, and Sir Andrew. The last scene of a drama is 
being played out, across which have flitted such images of 
purity, as grace alone the poetry of Spenser, Sidney, and 
Shakspere. Such men and women to love, honour, and 
revere, as seem for the time to have converted the real 
world into an illusory page of a splendid romance. 

On the 19 th of February, the friend of Sidney, the 
patron of Bacon, the hero of Cadiz, is to be brought to 
trial. His own folly furnishes the weapon to his own un¬ 
doing. The Queen will have his blood wash out those 
injuries which a woman never forgives. Cecil and Raleigh 
have their will. He, the son of one of the noblest sires 
that ever bequeathed the noble inheritance of unsullied 
honour to a gifted son, is charged with treason to his 
country and his prince. Sir Edward Coke, the attorney- 
general, assisted by the volunteer advocate Mr. Francis 
Bacon, and Mr. Serjeant Yelverton, have yet to prove that 
the insurrection was treasonable—that it fell within the 
Statute of Treasons. How they accomplish their task 
it is our duty to narrate. 

Robert Devereux’s father, Walter Devereux, the first 
Earl of Essex, died in the service of the state, an honour¬ 
able exile in Ireland. There his memory is cherished as 
that of a generous but sad and merciful man. Lodge 
epitomises his character and fortune “as loyal to en¬ 
thusiasm, but slighted by his sovereign ; of the most 
spotless honour and integrity, but never trusted; equally 


A DYING FATHER’S BEQUEST. 


225 


distinguished by his skill and bravery in the military pro¬ 
fession, to which he had dedicated his life; and uniformly 
checked in every enterprise he proposed ... he sank 
into the grave at an early age, at once an ornament and 
disgrace of his times, a sad memorial of disregarded 
merits and unrequited services.” 

Dying there amid strangers, attended only by his 
servants, he bequeathed, in words which cannot now be 
read without emotion, his children to the motherly care of 
the Queen. His wife, as he perhaps erroneously believes, 
has given up his honour to his deadliest foe. To the 
man who is now, by insidious craft and devilish subtlety, 
sapping his life and poisoning him by slow degrees. 
Whether the supposition was well or ill founded, matters 
little here. He fears the worst. Fears that Dudley has 
dishonoured him, has struck him ’twixt the joints of his 
harness, done him the most grievous wrong that can be 
wrought on a stainless knight. Has wounded him nearest 
to his heart, and now is killing him. 

He fears the seducer of his wife is his murderer—that 
the mother of his family is in alliance with his direst foe. 
Yet in his will, commending his children to the Queen’s 
care, no word of reproach crosses his lips. He pens the 
awful accusation without malignity. “ Will the Queen 
be a mother to his children, for they have no mother f n 
This is all. 

The leprous distilment works in his blood; his foe 
will again triumph, yet no cry escapes him. He is 
schooled in suffering; he is noble in blood, but nobler by 
nature ; he can suffer and be strong. The present Earl, 
his son, has his father’s nobility of soul, but is not sted- 

L 3 


226 


WESTM1NSTEK ABBEY. 


fast. He has the “ Bullen ” brains, the hot blood, the 
wilful temper, the too generous heart, with something of 
his father’s greatness, but not all. 

This legacy left by a dying man, this trust of a mother’s 
love, how is it answered ? 

The grandest existing monument of Gothic palatial 
architecture in Europe, Westminster Hall, sacred to the 
consecration of England’s kings, is the chosen place. It is 
worthy. On this very ground the wild Norman knights, 
their Norse blood quickened by fierce potations, once 
caroused. Here Saxons had often pleaded in vain for 
wrongs suffered, possessions wasted, extortion practised, 
to their haughty and insolent foe. Here barons in 
armour, bearing on their breasts the sign of the cross, in 
their hearts little of its beneficent teaching, drank and 
fought and swaggered, with their retainers at their back, 
knowing no law, to curb their imperious will. Here 
Richard the Second was formally deposed, and the usurper 
Henry triumphantly proclaimed him traitor and himself 
King. That proclamation was the weapon which brought 
Richard to the Tower, and after to a bloody and un¬ 
natural death. Here the Berkeleys, the Percies, the 
Willoughbies, the Scroops harangued and hated. Here 
for a hundred years the Kings in state had held their par¬ 
liaments—here for five hundred years in feudal pomp had 
been crowned. Here the great patriot Wallace received 
that sentence which numbered him with the dead ; here 
Sir Thomas More, the wise and witty, with a jest upon his 
lips, borne down by sickness and suffering, unable to 
stand, saw the sign which led him a doomed man to the 
headsman and the grave. Through this hall passed the 


THE PHANTOMS OF LIFE. 


227 


Duke of Buckingham, who came out hapless Edward 
Bohun ; and here ambitious, haughty Somerset was tried. 

For four hundred years clamorous suitors, impatient, 
weary, despairing, have paced this long hall, their hearts 
full of bitterness at man’s injustice. Some future satirist 
shall ask whether there be more souls damned here, or 
saved in the church hard by. No spider builds its web on 
those grand chestnut beams, nor on their clustering 
angels, which uphold the glorious roof. The webs 
woven are by men below; the toils, the toils of the law, 
those flimsy artifices which bind the flies and let the 
wasps break through. The walls are hung about with 
trophies of the war, with banners which tell of the triumph 
of the Reformation; with the colours of cruel Spain, won 
in a hundred battles by sea and land. All things asso¬ 
ciate to consecrate the hall to a mighty use. Living 
history—violent, barbaric, feudal—has been acted here. 
History—ecclesiastic, politic, national. History—Gothic 
earnest, and intolerant. And Essex’s is the last trial in 
Gothic history, the last in the Elizabethan age, the last 
before a new architecture, a new monumental art, a new 
literature, a new race of men shall arise. 

It is true the treason of Essex is no great occasion. 
Another century later on, a man related to this prisoner 
at the bar—to this energetic, good-natured, reckless 
courtier, a descendant of his wife’s, one Algernon Sidney, 
will fall here, and a nobler cause will lend a consecration 
to the scene. This defeat represents no principle. The 
cause is unworthy the cost of lives to be sacrificed. But 
’tis the auditory which fill up the measure of the trial. 
There cluster about the prisoner such men and women, 
such heroes, as never have, and perchance never will 


228 CAMDEN, JONSON, RALEIGH, SHAKSPERE. 


again, grace the trial of mortal on this earth. A race of 
men, with broad and majestic brows, whose sunken cheeks 
and pointed chins tell of the dominance of the spirit over 
flesh. Men melancholy grand as they live on the canvas 
of Velasquez, with an elevation that asks none from his 
wondrous pencil, nor from his marvellous dexterity. One 
Walter Raleigh, adventurer, poet, author, wit, statesman, 
orator, general by sea and land, with depths of light and 
shade in him beyond the Spaniard’s knowledge or art to 
compass, though he break his palette in despair, is there, as 
a Captain of the Guard. His look, as it falls on the prisoner 
at the bar, is not pleasant to think on. He has written 
a letter to Cecil, which alone can tell us the malignancy 
of his hate. The greatest constitutional lawyer that 
ever lived, the lawyer who has done more for the liberty 
of man than any other in all history, (is not this praise ?) 
is there as Sir Edward Coke, a rising man. Francis 
Bacon, the founder of a new philosophy, the enfranchiser 
of the mind, the “ brightest, meanest of mankind,” is there. 
Mr. Camden, the great antiquary and schoolmaster ; 
Ben Jonson, the poet and soldier, ultimus Romanorum, 
his scholar; Fletcher and young Beaumont, the play¬ 
wrights; and then, undistinguished among the crowd, 
there perhaps stands, an all but unknown man, a player, 
a Nazarene, one William Shakspere. 

And oh, think on it! genius that lingers long in ob¬ 
scurity, that repines, suffering “the proud man’s con¬ 
tumely,” he is unknown to Mr. Attorney Coke, or even 
to Francis Bacon, or to any of the great lords thereabout, 
save, perhaps, to Sackville and Southampton. For all 
Bacon’s philosophy he knows not, that, that poor despised 
player’s name, will outshine his own, will burn with a 


TIIE HEROES OF THE TIME. 


229 


brighter and steadier flame, and that there, in that humble 
garb, stands the greatest man that ever lived on earth, 
short of being divine. 

But if we are to consider probabilities, how many dis¬ 
tinguished men living at the time there, might such an 
occasion humour to be present! Drake, Gilbert, Whitgift, 
Hooker, Cavendish, Sidney, Marlowe, Hawkins, and others 
have been removed; but Napier of Merchistoun ; Fulke 
Lord Greville; Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the 
Bodleian Library ; Williams, by-and-by to be Lord Keeper 
and Archbishop of York, and founder of the Westminster 
library; Cotton; Harrington, the translator of the 
‘ Orlando Furioso,’ Michael Drayton, Stowe, Daniel, and 
Hakluyt, might all have been there. 

Among the women, perchance, the mother of Essex, 
once confessedly the most lovely woman of her time; 
Mary Sidney, the poetess, to whom her brother Sir Philip 
dedicated his ‘ Arcadia,’ (“ the gentlest shepherdess that 
lived that day,” of Spenser), on whom Jonson wrote the 
noblest epitaph ever penned. Lucy Harrington, the wife 
of Edward Russell, Earl of Bedford, incomparable, way¬ 
ward, lovely, learned, the lover of gardens and of flowers, 
the hymned of Daniel, of Ben Jonson, and of Donne. The 
unhappy and guilty Lady Rich, pretty, passionate, im¬ 
pulsive, the wooed of Sidney, the zealous pleader to the 
Queen for her unhappy brother. Her chaste, unsullied 
sister Dorothy; and a host of others not less worthy to 
be named. But this is not all. Every knight here is a 
hero of romance. They have fought in Parma’s dykes; 
have sailed the seas in craft no bigger than cock-boats; 
have touched at every port in that magic New World, 
and left the bones of brothers and kinsmen rotting and 


230 


THE MODERN ARGONAUTS. 


bleaching on every strand. They have sworn fealty and 
friendship by camp watch-fires, under the walls of 
beleaguered cities—have, in part, avenged that bloody 
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, have fought for the Pro¬ 
testant faith, and sounded forth, “ as out of Zion,” the 
“ trumpet of reformation to all Europe.” 

These are the Argonauts, the men who sailed to 
Colchis, and, sowing the dragons’ teeth, have brought 
back the golden fleece—heroes worthy another ‘ Iliad 
for wherein differs ‘ The Golden Hind ’ from ‘ The 
Argo ?’ As they all that are here now, sailed once away 
with many a brave heart now sleeping its last sleep, in 
1588, towards the setting sun, and again in 1596, these 
images of our ancestors—the Jason, the Theseus of the 
Anglo-Saxon race, all its glory seems to lend a new 
splendour to their glories and magnificence. That sun is 
the sun of chivalry, which sets as they glide down below 
the horizon. It is the last time such an assemblage shall 
be brought together. Men with more than mortal attri¬ 
butes—poets, statesmen, generals, wits, commanders, and 
philosophers. 

When Raleigh is tried three years after it will be at 
Winchester, and not in Westminster Hall, and neither 
Buckhurst, nor Sussex, nor Hertford, nor Shrewsbury, 
nor Oxford, nor Darcy, nor fifty others will be there. 
James’s reign will offer no similar opportunity. At 
Suffolk’s trial, thirty years before, neither Raleigh, nor 
Essex, nor Coke, nor Shakspere, nor Bacon would have 
been there. Northumberland’s was in the Star Chamber, 
and Coke and Bacon were still absent. When Coke and 
Bacon plead again in their strength Essex and Raleigh 
will be away. Another king, another dynasty, will have 


THE PASSING AWAY OF OLD THINGS. 


231 


supervened. Say we not rightly, then, that this is the 
tide’s turn in English history ? But it is more—it is the 
flood tide of fortune in the history of empires. 

Throughout Europe feudalism is giving way. In Eng¬ 
land the arch which supports the tower cracks to its 
fall. The vital shocks received by the feudal system in 
the Wars of the Roses, the growing power of the mer¬ 
chant and the trader, the assistance lent by the laws of 
Henry VII. to commerce, the facilities given by the 
“ Statute of Uses ” to the transfer of land, the discovery 
of the. New World, the introduction of printing, the trans¬ 
lation of classic authors, of the Bible itself, the emanci¬ 
pation of the country from the foreign dominion of the 
church, are only some of the causes which have been at 
work to sap the foundation of old things, and to construct 
this new political and social organization. Over all 
Shakspere’s literature broods, uniting the splendours of 
the old with the most potent glories of the new romance. 
The angelic purity of women, the courage, endurance, and 
valour that make the ideal of the troubadours’ story are 
enshrined in his text. His Art embodies the intellectual 
restlessness, the spiritual fervour, which is to distinguish “ a 
nation of prophets, of sages, of worthies ”—whose burden 
shall be, that increase of wisdom, which is increase of 
sorrow. Shakspere bestrides both hemispheres of thought. 
He holds aloft an unattainable and brilliant light in 
morals, religion, philosophy, and action, standing “a 
seamark to which all ships do run.” 

Elizabeth’s power is now at its highest, in twenty 
years all the feudal processions, ceremonies, jousts, 
tournaments, masques, and public feasts, the splendid 
hospitality and pomp of feudalism, which make am- 


232 


THE TALE THAT IS TOLD. 


bition virtue, will have become more or less unreal and 
unmeaning. They will live only as shows, having sur¬ 
vived their significance. The age succeeding will de¬ 
spise all these lusts of the eye. It will regard the temper 
and pursuits of these men with a sad and sober stern¬ 
ness. The night is closing in, but the morning will 
wake on a fresh people, another purpose, and a grander 
cause. 

From the day when Elizabeth first came to the throne, 
her might and the might of her empire in Europe have been 
gradually rising. The commencement of her reign was 
amid the most profound disasters. England was menaced 
at home and abroad. The country was divided against 
itself, not merely by faction, but by faction in its most 
intolerant form, as religious strife. A mighty revolution 
had been inaugurated, which had converted order into 
disorder, which had cumbered the ground with ruins, 
made the spoiled disaffected, and the spoilers hated. 
Ireland was in rebellion. The Scotch supported the 
claims of a rival to the throne. The aristocracy was no 
friend to the citizen. The old religion was supported 
abroad by the most powerful coalition ever formed, at the 
head of which, was the wealthiest and strongest power 
in Europe. A coalition bound together by the firmest 
bond of religious zeal, and a spirit of enthusiasm not 
less vehement than that which urged the Crusades. 
Turbulence and faction filled the land. Fear quick¬ 
ened religious zeal into cruelty. Rome filled the land 
with bigots in the old faith; with traitors prompt at 
disaffection, ready to make any sacrifice, to subvert 
their country or its faith, to gain freedom, mastery, or 
power. 


THE FALL OF FEUDALISM. 


233 


Out of this chaos, England had arisen, proud as when 
Milton saw her in inspired vision “ purging and unsealing 
her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly 
radiance a noble and puissant nation rousing herself 
like a strong man after sleep ” by the magic of her own in¬ 
herent strength. The country was torn with dissension. It 
is now great and powerful. One by one the Queen’s great 
enemies have been removed or conquered. Spain has been 
humbled. Ireland is at comparative peace. France is 
friendly. Scotland, her old enemy, is an ally. Elizabeth 
never was greater than now, yet she too will die, and the 
revolution of feeling which is to alienate the devotion of 
the most loyal people in Christendom will date from Essex’s 
fall. It will, in fifty years, aggravated by far different 
causes, by slow steps lead a king to the block. From the 
day in which Essex, the most popular man in England, risks 
his life in vain to secure an adherent (neither friend nor 
feudatory) against his sovereign to the day when Charles 
is ignominiously driven from his capital is less than forty- 
five years. 

This decline of feudalism, of chivalry, of loyalty im¬ 
parts to it an additional claim on our attention. The 
knowledge that all that was splendid, was then sealed 
to decay, sheds around the last days of Elizabeth an in¬ 
terest, which is allied to all that is grand and perishable. 
For the axe is at the root, the tower is crumbling; and 
at this period the fullness of time gives to the world in 
full maturity of thought William Shakspere, Francis 
Bacon, and Edward Coke. Without previous guide 
Napier is originating logarithms and freeing numbers 
from their incubus. Coke will secure liberty for the body 




234 HAMLET.—THE ‘NOVUM OKGANUM.’ 

of man. Francis Bacon will free his mind. William 
Shakspere, in ethics and in morals, will vindicate for 
infinite thought the freedom of infinite flight. 

At this very period Bacon is writing on the 4 Instau- 
ratio Magna,’ Coke on the Gloss on Magna Charta, 
Shakspere on Hamlet. In the 4 Novum Organum ’ and 
in Hamlet the grandeur of the age is consummated. 

Essex’s trial is a feudal trial. He is there with all his 
kinsmen and followers at his back. Every man involved 
is of his blood, is bound to him by fealty, or in honour, or 
is a hired retainer. Southampton, Blount, Monteagle, the 
Percys, Carew, Rutland, Vernon, are of his kin ; Merrick 
and Cuffe are his servants; Danvers is under obligation 
to Southampton. It seems as though the last gleam of 
that bright, intellectual radiance of Gothic and chivalrous 
history falls on him even now as he stands in the dock. 
He is yet a young man; but what proud place has he 
held in the very eye of Europe! He is allied to half the 
peerage. The Percys, the Manners, the Sidneys, the 
Blounts, the Devereux, the Herberts, are of the best and 
most distinguished blood in the realm.* His peers pause 
to bring so great a head to the scaffold. But the insidious 
Robert Cecil, who takes counsel with no man, fears many, 
and is revenged on all—the crookback will have it so. 
Yet he doubts. He sees that Essex’s friends may yet 
come to power, that the Scotch king will succeed. This 
card is dangerous to play. Raleigh has no such scruples ; 

* By this is implied simply, that having the opportunity afforded 
them of employing themselves in great affairs, the families enumerated 
above had distinguished themselves for generations in that employ¬ 
ment. 


RALEIGH A t( GOOD HATER.” 235 

his hate is malignant, not even to be sated by his enemy's 
blood ; but though it is less dangerous than Cecil’s, he 
fears not. He would end all by a quick stroke.* The 
Queen—ay ! she has reason to hate this man, whom she 
raised from nothing; whom she made Master of the 
Horse at twenty-two; who had his own fretful, foolish 
way in all that did not trench on her power; whom she 
loved so dearly; who has called her crooked; “ crooked 
in mind as in bodywho has jeered at her, to his loose 
companions and scorned her in his drink. She has rea¬ 
son : she will teach him. Cecil, her faithful servant, has 
told of his mad ways. His imperious folly is unbearable. 
She will humble his proud spirit. She and her secretary 
have named the commission to try him. 

Half of them are of Cecil’s following, and sworn to 
enmity to Essex. They dined together the very day after 
he returned from Ireland, and then and there they deter¬ 
mined his ruin. Cobham, Grey, Nottingham, Burleigh, 
Compton, judges and jury as they are, are sworn 
enemies. Nottingham he disgraced, ousted from his 
place. Burleigh is Cecil’s elder brother. Cobham and 
Grey are at open war—so much at enmity with South¬ 
ampton that they have come to blows in the street. 
Nottingham’s wife is in the Queen’s chamber. Essex 
calls her “ the Spider.” The tradition has it she hates 
Essex worst of all, and edges her husband on. Raleigh 
would move aside Essex as he would any rival that 
crossed his path; and because he hindered him with the 
Queen, and insulted him before the fleet. Monsieur Bossu 


* Vide Raleigli’s Letter to Cecil before the trial in Appendix. 


236 


HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN. 


hates him less, fears him more, and will have no rival so 
dangerous; but it is said of all his foes, Lady Nottingham 
is the worst. This is the lady whose name romance has 
linked with Essex’s, who concealed the ring which was to 
be the sign of contrition, and betrayed her trust.* 

With what pomp and circumstance the court assem¬ 
bles ! The light comes dimly through the stained windows; 
but ever and anon gleams of sunshine, mellowed, sub¬ 
dued, fall on the grand robes of state of the peers and 
nobles, on the quaint costumes of the Knights of the 
Bath, on the brilliant colours and ermined powdered 
dresses of the nobles’ wives, on the upturned faces of the 
motley crowd, pressing to hear this great man, this popular 
Lord, tried. Raleigh, feverish, impatient, stands near the 
bar, and beside him forty soldiers of the Queen’s guard, 
in their brilliant and splendid uniform. He can look 
back on a day when the fleets rode at anchor in Cadiz 
Bay, when that poor emaciated prisoner, sick in body, 
the shadow of his former self, was the joyous, enthusias¬ 
tic, yet considerate ruler of all that mighty and powerful 
host that swam so proudly in the blue water under that 
southern sky. 

Since the earliest morning the hall has been thronged 
with spectators, whom the knight-marshal and his fol¬ 
lowers, aided by the tipstaffs of the Fleet, have with diffi¬ 
culty kept in order. The door is still thronged, and each 
time the tapestry is drawn aside, and there comes a gust 
of the chill February air, eager faces under prentice 
caps, closely shaven Puritan heads, portly citizens, and 
even charming women, are seen pressing to be let in. The 
* See Note at end of book. 


THE OPENING OF THE COURT. 


237 


judges have taken their seats, and slowly one by one the 
commissioners have entered, to be in turn pointed out by 
garrulous fathers to pretty daughters, or by lovers to 
their sweethearts. But the Lord High Steward’s place 
is still empty. He, the Lord Treasurer Buckhurst, is 
to preside this day. His seat (placed on a raised 
dais) is in the marble chair of the Kings, under the 
great canopy of state, by the window at the further end. 
It is there he presides as the representative of his,sove¬ 
reign. 

In front, outside the bar, the great peers and judges 
of the realm, who are on the commission to try their 
peer, are assembled. The Dukes are in robes of 
crimson velvet, furred with ermine and powdered, that 
is, dotted with ermine according to their degree. The 
Barons of the Cinque Ports are all in crimson too, with 
points of blue and red hanging from their sleeves. The 
Knights of the Bath are in violet gowns with miniver- 
trimmed hoods. On all sides the eye rests on resplendent 
colour. The three judges, Popham, Anderson, and Sir 
William Periam, the chief baron, are now in their 
places, with their puisnes and the serjeants. There is a 
buzz of expectation, a rustling, every face to the door, and 
there enter seven serjeants-at-arms bearing maces, who 
come in slowly, and who are followed by the Lord High 
Treasurer, Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Dorset, in 
robes of crimson velvet richly embroidered, and here and 
there dotted with orient pearls, with his collar of state, 
his orders, and the garter about his k~^e. He is an 
elderly man, nigh to seventy, of grave aspect, as befits 
a great judge, who has dealt largely in the world’s affairs 


238 


THE MARINER EARL. 


—the bosom friend of Robert Cecil, bis dearest friend on 
earth, his twin brother. Thirty years ago he was am¬ 
bassador to Charles IX. When a young man he was 
a wild, thriftless prodigal. He is an Inner Temple man ; 
a famous poet and author; grand master of the Free¬ 
masons ; and entertained De Chatillon when he came 
over. He was chosen by the Queen to negotiate her 
marriage with Anjou; sat on the trials of Norfolk, 
and Philip Earl of Arundel; and finally, was one 
of the commissioners appointed to try Mary Queen of 
Scots; and announced sentence of death to that unhappy 
lady. 

Shall we, while the court is gathering, name some of 
the peers and judges? That bearded and moustached 
face so scarred and sunburnt, grizzled and severe, is 
George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, the mariner Earl. 
He was at the relief of Sluys, and fought against Parma. 
He has seen strange things. Sailed with Raleigh in his 
voyage of discovery, and attacked the Portuguese. More 
than ten years ago, he took Fayal; was wounded in a 
fight with a Brazilian ship, and severely scorched by 
villainous powder; returning home, to suffer on the 
voyage, pangs of hunger and drought unparalleled, in 
all the horrible narratives of miseries at sea. Is not the 
story in Hakluyt ? Since that he has been to the Azores, 
fought the Spaniards, and took a whole convoy with great 
treasure, after a hard fight. Rising from a sick bed, 
now some seven years since, he again went to the Azores, 
grievously harassed the Spaniards, and returned with little 
profit, but covered with honour. He it is who built the 
great ship, called by the Queen the 4 Scourge of Malice,’ 


THE PEERS AND JUDGES. 


239 


reputed the best and largest ship ever built. In this, 
with nineteen other vessels, he sailed in 1598 for the 
Spanish main. He again scourged the insolent Spaniard— 
the expedition, as usual, bringing no profit, only Fame; 
having lost two ships, a thousand men, and the booty not 
one tenth part covering the disbursements. He must be 
of Jack Falstaff’s belief in honour now. Men say of him, 
however, that he fears nothing on sea or land, and that, 
neither this world nor the w r orld to come, can have terrors 
for the husband of Margaret Russell. He is a reckless, 
quarrelsome man, noisy in speech, careless of home, so 
his high-spirited dame may have reason on her side. 
He and Essex are old foes. Robert Devereux thinks he 
lacks judgment. Clifford despises Robert’s wits. They 
are both punctilious in points of honour, hasty, and rash. 
His daughter will by-and-by be the wife of that William 
Herbert to whom it has since been said Shakspere dedi¬ 
cated his sonnets. 

Near him sits Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, 
descended from John of Gaunt, the ancestor of the 
Beauforts, the friend of Shrewsbury, close on sixty years 
of age, once the best horseman and soldier of his day. 
On his left is Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, 
Essex’s enemy. He commanded with Essex at Cadiz, 
and there the quarrel first began. Men say that his wife 
urges him on, that he is right, and Robert Devereux 
wrong. He married a kinswoman of the Queen’s, Cathe¬ 
rine Carey. Is a man, of approved valour, courteous 
temper, generous and humane—a good courtier; a little 
insincere, as they say the Howards are, but a noble 
gentleman. His kinsman, Thomas Howard of Walden, 


240 


THE FEUDAL TRIAL. 


future Earl of Suffolk, is on the same bench. He won his 
spurs in the Armada fight with Effingham, is now knight 
of the garter, and Constable of the Tower. Ten years 
ago he was fighting the Spaniard off the Azores, and 
lives immortal in Camden for his bravery. He is the 
ally and bosom friend of Robert Cecil; while he lives will 
thrive; but when that crooked gentleman dies, he will 
find statecraft too much for him, and, like Lucifer, will fall 
never to rise again. 

There, among the rest, is Gilbert Talbot, once am¬ 
bassador to France, the unnatural brother, fierce and 
imperious, hasty and petulant; with a wife as hot and 
self-willed as himself. Henry Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, his 
companion, another half-insane Earl, hated in his own 
neighbourhood in Lincolnshire.* Edward, Earl of Oxford, 
the poet earl, is a son-in-law of Burleigh. William Stanley, 
Earl of Derby, is a nephew of Robert Cecil. Bindon 
and Hunsdown are of the Howard stock. Hertford is 
Bindon’s son-in-law. Compton is another kinsman of the 
Cecils. It is difficult to trace the windings of these family 
links; but sufficient is known, to warrant the assertion 
that this trial is feudal—one man, and his family and 
friends, against the following and feudatories of another 
—in which the strife will be strong, in spite of law or 
justice. 

“ Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” The Lord High Steward com¬ 
mands silence on pain of imprisonment. Then the com¬ 
mission is read by the clerk of the crown empowering these 
lords to try Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Then 

* See petition referred to by Sir Egerton Brydges, in Collins’ 
Peerage, and in Lodge, vol. iii., p. 107. 


ATTITUDE OF THE PRISONERS. 


241 


another proclamation is made, commanding all justices to 
whom writs had been directed for this service, to bring 
them in. Then another proclamation, that the lieutenant 
of the Tower of London should return his precept, and 
the bodies of his prisoners, Robert, Earl of Essex, and 
Henry, Earl of Southampton. 

Here the excitement becomes intense, the crush terrific. 
In vain the marshal and the tipstaves try to keep order. 
There is a murmur like the sea, and Robert Devereux 
and Henry Wriothesley are led to the bar. First in the 
mournful procession comes the Lord High Constable of the 
Tower, then the lieutenant of the Tower, then the gentle¬ 
man porter bearing the ominous axe, the edge turned away 
from the prisoners, to indicate that there is yet hope, and 
that they are so far innocent men. The two Earls, who 
meet now for the first time since their imprisonment, fall 
on each other’s neck, and kiss one another’s hands. And 
sure two nobler or more faithful friends or more loving 
kinsmen never lived. 

Now every one can look on them. Robert Devereux 
is pale, yet calm ; his face nervous, yet compressed; his 
fine black eyes, that the Queen once so admired, flash 
round on all 'sides. They fall, for an instant, on Raleigh 
with scorn. Southampton is attentive, decorous, and 
more impassive. Then a proclamation is made, and the 
precept returned of the delivery of these two prisoners. 
And then a loud proclamation, and the peers who are 
to sit in judgment, and summoned to appear this day, are 
called to answer to their names. 

They are twenty-five in number. 


M 


242 


FEUDAL ENMITY. 


The Judges. 


Lord Treasurer Buckhurst, High Steward of England, 
President. 


Edward, Earl of Oxford. 
Gilbert, Earl of Shrewsbury. 
William, Earl of Derby. 
George, Earl of Cumber¬ 
land. 

Robert, Earl of Sussex. 
Edward, Earl of Hertford. 
Henry, Earl of Lincoln. 
Charles, Earl of Notting¬ 
ham. 

Thomas, Viscount Bindon. 
Thomas, Lord de la Warre. 
Edward, Lord Morley. 
Henry, Lord Cobham. 


Henry, Lord Stafford. 
Thomas, Lord Grey. 
Thomas, Lord Lumley. 
Henry, Lord Windsor. 
William, Lord Chandos. 
Robert, Lord Rich. 
Thomas, Lord Darcy. 
George, Lord Hunsdown. 
Oliver, Lord St. John of 
Bletso. 

Thomas, Lord Burleigh. 
William, Lord Compton. 
Thomas, Lord Howard. 
Baron of Walden. 


When the Lord Grey’s name (he is of the Greys of 
Wilton, not of Groby) is called, “ the Earl of Essex 
laughed upon the Earl of Northampton and jogged his 
sleeve.” 

Grey is the deadly enemy of Essex and Southampton. 
These unhappy noblemen know the nature of their 
jury — that these their judges are their enemies too. 
That not only are they of Burleigh’s kin, but that 
Compton is brother-in-law to Cecil; that William 
Chandos believes that Essex has done him wrong with his 
wife; that Rich is at feud with him on account of the 
desertion of his wife, Essex’s sister; and that Essex 
opposed Cobham for the Cinque Ports in 1597, against 


THE OPENING OF THE CASE. 


248 


Sidney. This last is the son-in-law of Nottingham, and 
one of the most active and inveterate of the Cecil faction, 
but a mere puppet in their hands. Essex asks “ if he 
may challenge any of the jury.” The favour is denied. 

Then the indictments are read, and the prisoners hold up 
their hands, and are required to declare themselves guilty 
or not guilty. They say, “Not guilty,” and throw them¬ 
selves on the mercy of God, and their peers. Serjeant Yel- 
verton, a friend of Bacon’s, and a pliant instrument for 
some years in his hands, as we shall see, opens the case. 
He is not sure of the law of the case, and does not speak 
to it. He charges the Earl with being rebelliously in arms 
against the Queen, to disinherit her of her crown and 
dignity ; that he treacherously imprisoned the judges 
Popham, Worcester, and Ellesmere. (Worcester is one of 
the judges now, and is thus a party, contrary to the maxim 
“ Aliquis non debet esse judex in sua propria causa, quia 
non potest esse judex et pars.”) That his confederates 
cried out, “Kill them! kill them!” while they were so 
imprisoned; that this conspiracy was like to Catiline’s ; 
that the Earl had nothing but papists, recusants, and 
atheists to abet him; and the learned counsel concluded 
his eloquent oration, before that high assembly, by praying 
that God might protect her Majesty’s royal person, and 
preserve her long from the malice of her enemies. 

Whereupon the two Earls cry out, “ Amen ! and may 
heaven confound all those who would seek to do her 
sacred person violence.” 

Sir Edward Coke rises: as his custom and manner is, he 
speaks closely. “ The Lord Chief Justices, which are the 
fathers of the law, know that the thought of treason, to 

M 2 


244 SIR EDWARD COKE’S RHETORIC. 

imagine it, is by the law death. That he that is guilty 
of rebellion is guilty of that intent. This he will prove 
in two points. To raise power and strength against a 
settled government, is in itself treason; but to usurp it, 
doth show a purpose to destroy the prince. If he is com¬ 
manded to dissolve his rebellious company, and he refuse, 
that is treason; and to levy forces to take any town in her 
Majesty’s dominion is so likewise. “But my Lord of 
Essex hath levied power to take the Tower of London, 
and to surprise the Queen’s own court: this must needs be 
higher than the highest, for the court is more sacred 
than the Tower, as to fortify oneself against the prince’s 
power is worse than mere rebellion.” 

Sir Edward then gets into his squandering vein, de¬ 
fining and dividing his subject in the oddest and most 
incongruous manner; as is also usual to him, mixing 
up his division of subjects with abuse of the Earl—with 
attacks on his ingratitude, because the father had been 
made first Earl of Essex by Henry VIII.—charging him 
with intending to kill the counsellors of state, which is 
not proved in evidence, and which Mr. Attorney Coke 
knew he had no right to insinuate. And at this point, 
the Earl of Essex, who, like all the men of his time, 
knew something of law, perchance, but being moved 
more probably by an instinct assuring him that Coke in 
making a false accusation, was behaving illegally, stopped 
him. 

Essex .—“ Will your lordships give us our turn to speak, 
for he (Coke) playeth the orator, and abuseth your lord¬ 
ship’s ears and us with slanders ? but these are but the 
fashions of orators in corrupt states.” 


WITHERINGTON THE SPY. 


245 


His lordship is in his turn interrupted, and the evidence 
of one Witherington, a spy, is read. It is to the effect 
that order was left, it is not said by the Earl or by whom, 
that if the Earl miscarried, the counsellors should be 
killed. This man has merely thrust himself into the 
company on the day of the rising. He is perjuring him¬ 
self, and the Earl speaks vehemently. 

Essex .—“ I will not, I protest to God, speak to save 
my life ; for those that prosecute it against me shall do 
me a good turn to rid me of my misery and put them¬ 
selves out of fear. Mr. Witherington doth much dis¬ 
parage himself. I protest to God, upon my salvation, 
I never heard such words as ‘ Kill him ! kill him !’ Mr. 
Witherington came voluntarily to my house, unsent for, 
and in the forenoon did come into our company, and 
these are but reports. Had such a cry been secretly 
made, Mr. Witherington could have deposed ; but being, 
as he declares, openly spoken, a hundred others might 
have testified, yet none spake it besides/’ 

The Lord Keeper, the Earl of Worcester, and the Lord 
Chief Justice Popham, declare here, upon their honours, 
that they heard the shout “ Kill them ! kill them!” but they 
will not aver that it was made with my Lord of Essex’s privity 
or command. The declaration of these lords is then put in, 
as to their confinement in the house during Sunday, when 
the rising was taking place, as has been already de¬ 
tailed ; and then the written papers of examination of the 
various conspirators—Sir John Davis, Sir Charles Dan¬ 
vers, Sir Christopher Blount, and Raleigh’s spy, Sir Fer- 
dinando Georges, on his own proof, a base knight. 

These testimonies are put in, in evidence: but the 


246 


PROGRESS OF THE TRIAL. 


depositions thus made, are not substantiated by the pre¬ 
sence or cross-examination of the accuser. 

And here allusion may be made to a recent wonderful 
discovery that this was a popish plot. Essex says,— 

“ And whereas, we are charged to have dealt with 
Papists: I assure your lordship, and it is most true, that 
Papists have been hired and suborned to witness against 
me ; as by the means of one Sudall, who was a seminary 
priest, and sent into Ireland to deal with Sir Christopher 
Blount, whom he thought to be inward with me, to 
touch my reputation and honour. And Bales, the scri¬ 
vener in the Old Bailey, hath confessed that he has forged 
my hand to at least two letters, and here are two honest 
gentlemen to witness it.” 

Again, in answer to the charge that Davis is a Papist, 
and drawn in by Sir Christopher Blount, Essex replies— 

“ If Sir John Davis were such a man I must have 
heard it. I couldn’t search into his heart. Yet have 1 
seen him dutifully come to prayers, and to the service of 
God in my own house with me, and behaved himself very 
godlily, and of this I can be witness. And as for Blount, 
God is my witness, 1 have been so far from popery, as I 
have so earnestly dealt with him, to reform himself, 
insomuch that he hath told me I have been very pas¬ 
sionate.” 

Coke (on the forging of the two letters)—“ Ay, by my 
troth that is true ; but it was by the procurement of one 
of your own men.” 

Essex, passionately. (This pleading for life against 
false witnesses is no child’s play.)—“ Thou swearest it, 
that man thou sayest procured to do it, his name is John 


THE ESSEX RISING NOT POPISH. 


247 


Daniel, an arrant thief, one that stole a casket of my 
wife’s, and many other things. Is it likely that I should 
trust him ? But it is well known who set him to work, 
to get my hand counterfeited,” (Cecil is alluded to) ; 
“ yet this man, this enemy, this traitor to me and mine, 
must be a practiser in such matters by my own consent. 
Mr. Attorney, I thank God you are not my judge this 
day ; you are so uncharitable” 

The deposition of Sir Ferdinando Georges, Raleigh’s 
friend, is now put in. He asserts, as all such informers 
do, that, though engaged in the conspiracy, he endeavoured 
most earnestly to dissuade the Earl from the fatal step. 
Essex now pleads to him, “ I pray thee, good Sir 
Ferdinando, speak openly whatsoever thou dost remember, 
and with all my heart I desire thee to speak freely.” 

Georges. —“ All that I can remember I have delivered 
in my examination; and further I cannot say.” 

Essex .—Yes, Ferdinando; if ever you knew an 
other matter which contained any thought of treason or 
disloyalty, speak it; for they are things not to be forgot¬ 
ten.” 

Southampton. —“Good Sir Ferdinando, satisfy the 
court what was intended among all our conferences and 
talk of our enemies, and discontentments, and consulta¬ 
tions, and what was our best course for our defence against 
them.” 

Georges , thus abjured , answers. —“ Some delivered 
their minds one way, some another; but, by the oath I 
have taken, I did never know or hear any thought or pur¬ 
pose of hurt or disloyalty intended to her Majesty’s 
person by my Lord of Essex.” 


248 


THE GRATEFUL RETURN. 


Cobham having been alluded to by Essex as bearing 
enmity to him, asks why Essex casts such imputations on 
him. 

Essex replies .—“My Lord, I have forgiven all the 
world, and therefore you shall not need to insist on these 
circumstances. I protest I bear your lordship no malice ; 
and I further declare that what I have spoken was not 
out of fear of death or desire of life.” 

Many times during this examination, during this great 
trial, must the spectators’ minds have swayed to and 
fro, like trees driven by the winds. When the two Earls 
embrace, when Witherington’s testimony was adduced, 
when Bacon rises, the excitement at points must have 
intensified. His great popularity, his misfortunes, make 
him an object of pity. They see him foredoomed (like 
Milton’s Satan) by fate to die. “ He is so young to fall 
by the axe: and he was driven to despair by love, and 
he has two little girls and a little son, only nine years 
old, and his wife, they say, dotes on him, for he is a most 
loving lord.” 

Now rises Francis Bacon, the “ much-bounden ” friend. 

Bacon .—“ My lord, may it please your grace ; whatso¬ 
ever my Lord of Essex hath here denied in my conceit it 
seemeth to be small. I speak not to any ordinary jury, 
but to prudent, grave, and wise peers;* and this I must 
needs say, it is evident that you, my Lord of Essex, had 
planted a pretence in your heart against the government; 
and now, under colour of excuse, you must lay the cause 

* This is the Old Bailey practice. “ I speak not to men unaccustomed 
to the usages of business, but to' men of intelligence and patriotism,” 
&c. &c. 


THE “BOUNDEN” FRIEND. 


249 


upon particular enemies. You put me in remembrance 
of one Pisistratus, that was come into a city, and doting 
upon the affections of the citizens unto him, he having the 
purpose to procure the subversion of a kingdom , and want¬ 
ing aid for the accomplishing his humour, thought it the 
surest means for the winning of the hearts of the citizens 
unto him, and so in that hope entered the city, and cut 
his body overthwart, to the end they might conjecture he 
had been in danger ; and so by this means held the 
same conceit as you and your complices did, entering the 
City of London, persuading yourselves if they had under¬ 
taken your cause all would have gone well on your side. 
And now, my lord, all you have said or can say in 
answer to these matters are but shadows; and therefore? 
methinks it were your best course to confess and not to 
justify.” 

Essex .—“ May it please your lordship, I must produce 
Mr. Bacon for a witness; for when the course of private 
persecution was in hand and most assailed me, then 
Mr. Bacon was the man that proffered means to the 
Queen, and drew a letter in my name and his brother Sir 
Nicholas Bacon’s name, which letter he purposed to show 
the Queen, and Gosnal was the man that brought them 
unto me, wherein I did see Mr. Bacon’s hand pleaded as 
orderly, and appointed them out that were my enemies, 
as directly as might be. Which letters I know Mr. Secre¬ 
tary Cecil hath seen, and by him it will appear what 
conceit he held of me, and no otherwise than he here 
coloureth and pleadeth the contrary.” 

The Earl cannot understand this double dealing, this 
private testimony in his favour, this public denunciation of 

M 3 


250 


AN INJUDICIOUS ATTACK. 


his atrocity, equalling that of Pisistratus, and which it 
would do well for him to confess. Bacon volunteers an 
apology. 

Bacon.— 66 My lord, I spent more hours to make you a 
good subject than upon any man in the world besides; 
but since you have stirred up this point, my lord, I dare 
warrant you this letter will not blush, for I did but per¬ 
form the part of an honest man, and have ever laboured 
to have done you good, if it might have been, and to no 
other end ; for what I intended for your good was wished 
from the heart, without touch of any man’s honour.” 

JEssex .—“ Well, my lord, I do here protest, before the 
living God, that an honourable, grave, and wise counsellor 
hath lamented and grieved at the courses he hath seen 
taken, and therewith hath wished himself often dead ; and 
this I speak upon credible and honourable information ; but 
I can prove thus much from Sir Robert Cecil’s own 
mouth, that he, speaking to one of his fellow-counsellors, 
should say that none in the world but the Infanta of Spain 
had right to the crown of England.” 

Who this grave and wise counsellor may mean can 
only be guessed ; it may, perchance, have been Cecil, who 
was, as far we see, subsequently Mr. Comptroller, who 
had made protestations that he disliked the courses taken 
by Essex’s foes to overthrow him ; but is more likely to 
have been some greater man, Ellesmere, or other. The 
bearing of this speech on Bacon is not clear ; but perhaps 
the courses condemned include those of Bacon no less 
than of the Queen and Cecil. 

Thus challenged, Cecil steps into the arena; Le Petit 
Bossu will not thus be attacked. His reply to the Earl is 


ROBERT CECIL. 


251 


by no means as dignified as we should expect a privy 
councillor to make—but who can be wise, crafty, prudent, 
all on the instant ?—and his jealous vindictiveness shines 
forth. 

Sir R. Cecil .—“ The difference between you and me is 
great, for I speak in the person of an honest man, and 
you, my lord, in the person of a traitor; so well I know 
you have wit at will. The pre-eminence hath been yours, 
but I have innocence, truth of conscience, and honesty to 
defend me against the scandal of slanderous tongues and 
aspiring hearts; and I protest before God I have loved 
your person and justified your virtues ; and I appeal to 
God and the queen that I told her Majesty your afflictions 
would make you a fit servant for her.” (I would submit is 
not this in the “ qui s’'excuse s'accuse ” spirit ? His candour 
has not been impeached, yet he proceeds to protest that 
he has not been guilty of double dealing, but it is with 
the reservation of conscience that if he has not done much 
to serve Essex, he would have done more if Essex had 
been worthy. My friend Bossu, I sadly fear your honesty, 
notwithstanding Dorset’s testimony, and that the world 
was right in its judgment, and your conscientious executor 
wrong.) He continues: “ And had not I seen your 
ambitious affections inclined to usurpation I could have 
gone on my knees to her Majesty to have done you good; 
but you have a sheep’s garment in show, and in appear¬ 
ance are humble and religious; but God be thanked we 
know you; for indeed your religion appears by Blount, 
Davis, and Tresham, your chiefest counsellors for the 
present.” Mr. Bossu knows how false this is, but it is 
the bitterest thrust he can invent to charge Essex with 




252 THE DANGEROUS RETORT. 

being a Catholic. At this time to charge him with 
Catholic tendencies is much what it would be in the north 
of Ireland to-day, or to charge him with heresy in Spain. 
“And by promising liberty of conscience hereafter, I 
stand for loyalty which I never lost; you stand for 
treachery wherewith your heart is possessed; and you 
charge me with high things, wherein I defy you to the 
uttermost. You, my good lords, counsellors of state, have 
had many conferences, and I do confess I have said the 
King of Scots is a competitor, and the King of Spain a 
competitor, and you ” (here he turns on Essex) “ I have 
said are a competitor. You would depose the queen, you 
would be King of England, and call a parliament. Ah ! 
my lord, ivere it but your oivn case the loss had been the 
less ; but you have drawn a number of noble persons and 
gentlemen of birth and quality into your net of rebellion, 
and their bloods will cry vengeance against you. For my 
part I vow to God I wish my soul was in heaven and my 
body at rest so this had never been.” 

The cunning malignity of this speech, its treacherous 
insinuation and bitterness are unsurpassable in history. 

The Cecils, father and son, occupy a great place in his¬ 
tory, but no attempt has heretofore been made to elucidate 
their characters. Burleigh was, in the main, an honest 
though a wise, wary, and subtle politician. No criminal 
act lies against his fame, except, possibly, that of fur¬ 
nishing the materiel or guiding the pen for the libel 
‘Leicester’s Commonwealth,’ attributed to Parsons, the 
Jesuit. This is no place to discuss his character, but 
it may certainly be affirmed that while he possessed much 
greater legitimate resources than his son Robert, he was 




THE TWO CECILS. 


253 


much his inferior in treachery and cunning, and was on 
the whole much more scrupulous. The hypocritic affir¬ 
mations contained in this last sentence are worthy Sir 
Robert’s aunt, Lady Ann Bacon, or his cousins, Francis 
or Anthony themselves. Perhaps it came from the same 
source—from the Cook family. 

Essex. —“’Ah! Mr. Secretary, I thank God for my 
humbling, that you, in the most of your bravery, came to 
make your oration against me here this day.” 

This is dignified, but for Mr. Secretary Cecil’s reply as 
much cannot be said. 

Cecil .—“ My lord, I humbly thank God that you did 
not take me for a fit companion for you and your 
humours; for if you had, you would have drawn me to 
betray my sovereign, as you have done. But I would 
have you name the counsellor you speak of; name him, 
name him, name him, if you dare, if you dare, I defy 
you ; name him if you dare.” 

Cecil is a scold. We see enough in Essex’s present 
provocation of his enemy’s wrath to perceive that the 
Earl’s judgment was not reliable, and to incline us to sup¬ 
pose that his want of caution should have been sufficient 
to have deterred Bacon from his alliance. Robert Cecil 
was, in truth, a little man called by circumstances to great 
affairs. 

Essex .—“ Here stands an honourable person ” (he indi¬ 
cates the Earl of Southampton) “ that knows I speak no 
fables; he heard it as well as I.” 

Cecil .—“ Then, my Lord of Southampton, I adjure you, 
by the duty you owe to God, loyalty and allegiance you 
owe to your sovereign, by all tokens of true Christianity, 


254 


ATTACK ON THE PRISONER. 


and by the ancient friendship and acquaintance once 
between us, that you name the counsellor.”* 

The counsellor is named, is sent for at Cecil’s earnest 
request, and declares, “ I never did hear Mr. Secretary 
use any such words,” or to that effect. 

Whereupon Mr. Secretary thanked God that though 
the Earl stood there as a traitor, yet he was found an 
honest man and a faithful subject; withal saying, “ I 
beseech God to forgive you for this open wrong done unto 
me, as I do openly pronounce I forgive from the bottom 
of my heart.” 

To this Essex replies sarcastically— 

.Essex .—“ And I, Mr. Secretary, do clearly and freely 
forgive you with all my soul, because I mean to die in 
charity.” 

In the (by a modern standard) informal mode of con¬ 
ducting the trial, a further recrimination takes place 
between Mr. Attorney Coke, Southampton, and Essex, in 
the course of which Southampton alleges that the first 
occasion “ that made me adventure into these courses 
was the affinity betwixt the Lord of Essex and me, I being 
of his blood and marrying his kinswoman, so that for his 
sake I should have hazarded my life.” 

Essex then enters on his defence. The report given in 
the State Trials is not long; but, such as it is, it is not 

* In the Hamlet of 1604, 4to., there is this passage, Act 2, Scene 2 : 
“ But let me conjure you, by the rights of our fellowship, by the con- 
sonancy of our youth, by the obligation of our ever preserved love, and 
by what, more dear, a better proposer could charge you withal,” &c. 
Is this likeness accidental, or do Cecil's words live imperfectly in Shak- 
spere’s memory as he pens his immortal work ? For it is curious the 
same passage is not in the 1603 4to. 


THE TKIAL. 


255 


greatly to the purpose, nor urged with that vehemence or 
force which we should suppose would be natural to a 
man on trial for his life. It contains two affirmations, 
however. “ And here I protest before the ever-living 
God, as He may have mercy on me, that my conscience is 
clear from any disloyal thought or harm to her Majesty; 
and my desire ever hath been to be free from bloodshed, 
as Mr. Dove can witness. But if in all my thoughts and 
purposes I did not ever desire the good estate of my 
sovereign and country , as of my own soul , I beseech the 
Lord then show some marie upon me and my soul , in this 
place, for a just vengeance of my untruths to all the 
world. And God, which knoweth the secrets of all 
hearts, knoweth that I never sought the crown of England, 
nor ever wished to be a higher degree than a subject.” 
And then the young Earl concludes by declaring that his 
desire was only to secure access to the Queen in his rash 
undertaking to secure himself against his enemies, not to 
shed their blood, and that he repels any charge of his 
being a hypocrite, or an Atheist, or a Papist, or a favourer 
of any sectary, “ as my Lord of Canterbury knoweth and 
can testify: for my religion it is sound, and, as I live, I 
mean to die in it.” 

Then rises Bacon again. “ Well, my lord, may it 
please your grace, you may see how weakly he (the 
prisoner) hath shadowed his purpose, and how slenderly 
he hath answered the objections against him. But, my 
lord, doubting that too much variety of matter may 
minister occasion of forgetfulness, I will only trouble your 
lordship’s remembrance with this only point, rightly com¬ 
paring this rebellion of my Lord of Essex to the Duke of 


256 


REASONING BY ANALOGY. 


Guise’s, that came upon the barricades at Paris in his 
doublet and hose, attended upon with eight men. But 
his confidence in the city was such (even as my lord’s 
was), that when he had delivered himself so far, and that 
the shallowness of his own conceit could not accomplish 
what he expected, the king, for his defence, taking arms 
against him, he was glad to yield himself, thinking to 
colour his pretexts, turned his practices, and alleged the 
occasion thereof to be a private quarrel. 

This speech of Bacon’s, as well as the one preceding 
it, show that Bacon is a reasoner by analogy, and not 
by induction. It is poor in legal argument, hence 
perhaps his want of success as a lawyer. Illustrations 
are not argument. Analogic power is demanded, for it 
gives grasp, but the first need is clearly logic. 

Essex speaks briefly in reply, not in explanation of hi s 
conduct, or in his further defence, but alleging that he 
surrendered himself on conditions, and pleading for his 
companions, a speech, brief as it is, disclosing his extreme 
disinterestedness and zeal for his friends. 

Then the Sergeant-at-Arms, after a pause, and much 
whispering and commotion among the judges, and a great 
pushing and thrusting among the crowd, stands forth, and 
amid breathless silence proclaims: “ Lieutenant of the 
Tower, remove your prisoners from the bar.” Then the 
judges and the peers retire together into a space enclosed, 
at the end of the hall, and at the back of the canopy and 
chair of state. The two chief judges and the chief baron 
being sent for to deliver their opinions in law on the case, 
and there they remain in consultation for half an hour. 

Half an hour! How wearily lags the time to the 


SUSPENSE. 


257 


unhappy prisoners at the bar, yet with very different im¬ 
pressions does the suspense come laden to each. Essex is 
a sanguine man by nature, but he has a premonition 
about his heart that his sands are well nigh run out. 
Twelve months’ misery and exile from the court, sick¬ 
ness, and the power of his enemies, have told on his 
spirits, and he fears the worst. Southampton has still 
hope. He was only an abettor of Essex—an accessary. 
He knew no treason, believed in none. Essex had no 
such designs as his enemies impute to him, but Essex 
was vain, headstrong, rash, believed himself stronger than 
he was, and has been guilty of an act capable of bearing 
the worst construction, if he had not the worst intention. 
Men are as often punished for their folly as their crime. 
So far Essex should be punished, so far Southampton 
should participate, but he feels himself a minor criminal, 
and therefore not justly amenable to the full severity of 
the law. 

In that half hour’s suspense who shall paint the rush 
of emotion about the prisoner’s heart ? My Lord of Essex 
is but human, suffers no more than the poor letter-carrier 
condemned amid the business and formal callousness of 
the Old Bailey to his term of penal servitude. He 
suffers, perchance, less, for he has not the agonizing con¬ 
sciousness of a poor mother tottering across the court, 
blinded by her tears and stumbling at every step, with 
letters and testimonies of character which she has scraped 
from all sources, which she has worried from neighbours, 
which she has with boldness and audacity wrung from 
men she never dared to face before, for her only son. 
But men have in all ages determined to recognize the 


258 


ESSEX’S EMOTIONS. 


sufferings of the great and the heroic, and not of the 
domestic. They will not believe in the “ corporal suffer¬ 
ance,” of the beetle, though it “ finds a pang as great as 
when a giant dies.” Perhaps it suffers less, despite the 
poet. If not more in ratio, still it is more comparatively, 
and so fills a larger space in the world of sorrow. The 
Earl has dropped down like one of the Titans, has been 
hurled as out of heaven. He has a proud, sensitive heart; 
he has an unbending temper; he has a great vanity 
quickened by that benevolence of nature which, keenly 
sensitive to pain in others, fears also with a morbid sensi¬ 
tiveness and sentiment to bear it. There is in him the strife 
of nature, of courage and womanly tenderness, of nobility 
with fear of shame, even of shame not ignobly wrought. 
He looks round ; he sees many eyes of pity, much sorrow, 
and commiseration, and his thoughts recur to his fond and 
dearest wife, the partner—the more than partner of all 
his trials. He thinks of his children, of his boy now 
growing up to man’s estate, and his heart beats as his eye 
falls on Raleigh and the troops, for the one moment when 
he might again plunge through his foes, and to the sound 
of the trumpet and the charge die a soldier’s death, his 
face to his foes, amid the whirlwind and din of battle. 
What would he give for the open sky above, the free 
wind of heaven, and a triumphant fall. Then his eye falls* 
perchance, on the stained windows, and he finds himself 
idly counting the panes of glass, tracing out the scutcheons, 
and is startled from his reverie and vacuity of mind by a 
stir in the court, for he fears the jury are coming, and 
now his heart throbs as if it would burst. 

It is nothing, only a woman borne out fainting. The 


FACTS AND FICTION. 


259 


morning is cold and raw, and grey and gusty, and yet 
the court has grown stifling to some, for there are 
many there who pity the young Earl, who think of his 
grand proud figure as he figured at jousts and tourna¬ 
ments ; as he appeared the young champion of the great 
Queen, the proud emblem of his country’s chivalry, valour, 
and adventure. 

I am not bound down to the mere facts : I am bound 
by them ; but I may hold up this bald narrative of the 
State Trials, and say, Is this an account of Essex’s trial ? 
it is the fossil of it; it is the skeleton, the dead bones 
of the valley of death. The reporters of that day were 
less skilled (and so far for the historian, more con¬ 
scientious) than those of to-day. They did not improve 
on their speaker. They did not make sense of his non¬ 
sense, or convert an inartificial and faulty speech into 
a polished and artistic oration. They were far less in¬ 
genious, for reporting was in its infancy, and signs had to 
stand for words, and so words were often overthrown; 
but if the reports were not so full, if the reporter only 
gave us parts of speeches, we know that those parts are, 
in the main, the words, the very words, of the speaker. 
So far even want of intelligence has its advantage, truth 
being greater gain than polish or art. We have not, for¬ 
tunately, to strive with a Johnsonese version of Bacon’s 
and Essex’s speeches on this occasion, but their true 
thoughts, cumbered with all their faults of expression, the 
clumsiness of nearly all oratory, when literally reported* 
But surely even this does not represent what actually 
transpired on that eventful day. 

There are finite bounds to history ; and narrative is well 
nigh as fatal to circumstance as is memory to the true 


260 


THE MOTLEY CROWD. 


preservation of exact knowledge. Imagination, as it is 
called, the power to create, out of one’s knowledge of 
other facts and other occurrences, something which by 
analogy can be applied, or be shown to resemble the 
actual occurrence, is a poor substitute. Yet humanity 
is the same at all times, under certain circumstances, 
and to a definite extent, allowing for race, and character, 
and temper. A mob at Athens would behave like a mob 
in London. The trial of my Lord of Essex is neither 
more nor less, in some of its phases, than the trial of any 
other great noble peer or criminal, any man who has 
played a great part, as a bright particular star in that 
particular theatre, in the world’s eye, which is dignified 
by being considered historical, and where the poor players 
are said to enact history, though often in the meanest 
manner to the pitifulest audience. 

The Puritan with his hair close cropped, his aspect 
sour and atrabilious, earnest and enthusiastic, the rough 
and careless latitudinarian, whose creed is ample as his 
girth ; the thick-lipped, narrow-browed, sharp-nosed, be¬ 
liever in witchcraft and demons, in torture and the rack, 
the heavy, happy enjoyer of this world’s goods, elbow 
each other in the crowd. There are ladies whose won¬ 
derful toilettes tell with what emotions of pleasure and 
vanity they came forth to be admired. It matters little 
that no one has seen them, that no one could see them;— 
that if noticed at all, it was with a stare—rude, super¬ 
cilious, envious, or contemptuous in the beholder; or that 
they have been, as we know, the subjects of pity to many 
friends less fair. 

It needs no prophet to tell us that while many a wife 
has been preparing full of flurry and anxiety, her restless 


PURITANS AND PATHOS. 


261 


husband, chafing behind his ruff, his gallant velvet cloak 
well displayed, is pacing passionately, in seething anger, 
up and down the hall—-that while this comedy is passing 
in hundreds of houses, in two or three there is tragedy of 
weeping and misery. Lady Essex, sits like Niobe, all 
tears, amid her crying children (a babe in arms but two 
months old at the most), who only dimly understand their 
father’s danger and their mother’s woe. Lady Rich, the 
passionate sister, is full of denunciation : her anger strug¬ 
gles with her tears : she is by turns vehement and hysteric. 
She will go to the Queen and pull her from the throne ; she 
will confound all Essex’s enemies ; she moans and tears her 
hair for “ Poor Robin,” and wishes Blount,* were there to 
help him; as if Blount could help him. Dorothy, Northum¬ 
berland’s wife, is shedding silent tears. Her husband in 
the Low Countries; he was safe to trust to pull down 
Essex, but not to sacrifice his life ; he was better out of the 
way. Lettice Knollys, she who has seen so much grief: 
her first husband die of poison, her second suddenly ; 
her first son, Walter, in his pride of youth abroad, at 
Rouen, and now Robin, her favourite and best beloved, 
most like herself; so young, so gifted, so handsome in a 
mother’s eyes, so bold and fearless, so loving, honest, out¬ 
spoken. Does not Letitia, the mother, cry ? Has she no 
pangs at her evil fate ? Alas! her grief is demonstrative 
too, bitter and poignant, noisy and clamorous, but there 
is a belief that such woe is rarely long lived. 

The half-hour of suspense wears on ; the crowd grows 
impatient, starts at every noise about the chair of estate, 
keeps its eyes eagerly fixed on the door whence is to 
* Lord Mountjoy. 


262 “GUILTY, UPON MY HONOUR.”' 

issue the procession of the judges, indulges in much seeming 
levity, in whispering, in many light jokes, has tired itself 
with pointing out the relatives of the prisoners, in com¬ 
menting on their bearing, in foolish hypotheses as to the 
cause which brought them there. At last there is a noise, 
a rustling of the crimson curtains at the end of the Hall 
and by the canopy of state, and the judges issue forth. 
Then they take their places, and the sergeant-at-arms, 
coming to the barriers, makes proclamation of silence 
again, and calling on Lord Thomas Howard the puisne 
lord, (the least on the list,) with formal circumstance, 
there is again a pause. 

Then rising slowly my Lord Thomas Howard stands 
up in his place, bare headed. “My Lord Steward — 
Lord Thomas Howard, Whether is Robert, Earl of Essex, 
guilty of this treason of which he is indicted ? Guilty, 
or not guilty, upon your honour,” 

Lord Thomas Howard .—Whereupon the Lord Thomas, 
bending his body and placing his left hand upon his right 
side, said, “ Guilty, my lord, of high treason, upon my 
honour.” And then all the other peers in succession, 
from the least to the highest, find their verdict in like 
manner; and being called anew, found Henry, Earl of 
Southampton, guilty in like manner. 

History is silent, as if these were not human beings, 
but merely figures carved out of stone, as to the “ be¬ 
haviour in court.” Do no women sob? are there no 
shrieks, no pangs of woe visibly expressed ? or is it 
merely a city enchanted, like that of the ‘ Arabian 
Nights,’ and these human beings but shadows, without 
life or motion ? 


Essex’s justification. 


263 


The sergeant-at-arms stands up again to command the 
lieutenant of the Tower to bring his prisoners to the bar 
again, and they are placed there—men’s eyes bending on 
them in pity. Then the clerk of the court said: “ Robert, 
Earl of Essex, you have been arraigned and indicted of 
high treason; you have pleaded not guilty, and for your 
trial you have put yourself on God and your peers. 
Your peers have found you guilty. What have you to 
say in your defence, why you should not have judgment 
of death passed upon you ?” 

Essex .—“ I only say this, that since I have committed 
that which hath brought me within the compass of the 
law, I may be counted the law’s traitor, in offending the 
law, for which I am willing to die, and will as willingly 
go thereto as ever did any; but I beseech your lordship, 
and the rest of the lords here, to have consideration of 
what I have formerly spoken, and do me the right as to 
think me a Christian, and that I have a soul to save, and 
that I know it is no time to jest. Lying and counterfeiting 
my soul abhorreth ; for I am not desperate nor void of 
grace, now to speak falsely. I do not speak to save my 
life, for that I see were vain. I owe God a death, which 
shall be welcome, how soon soever it pleaseth her Majesty. 
And to satisfy the opinion of the world, that my con¬ 
science is free from Atheism and Popery, howsoever I have 
been in this action misled to transgress the points of the 
law, in the course and defence of private matters, and 
whatsoever, through the weakness of my wit, and dulness 
of my memory, or through violent courses (if there be 
any violent that seek either life or death); or if I have 
omitted, or may have uttered anything otherwise; yet I 


264 


THE LOVER’S MESSAGE. 


will live and die in the faith and true religion which here 
I have professed.” 

The same ceremony of sentencing is then gone through 
with Southampton ; after which the Lord Steward, ad¬ 
dressing Essex, suggesting that the Queen hath bestowed 
many favours on his predecessors and himself, asks 
him to throw himself on the queen’s mercy, confessing 
his offences, and 44 reconciling himself inwardly to her 
Majesty.” From Essex’s answer, we may glean the per¬ 
sonal feeling between himself and the Queen, which is 
rather that of an outraged lover, or an injured equal, 
than of a subject convicted of treason. 

j Essex .— 44 My lord, you have made an honourable 
motion. Do but send to me at the time of my death 
and you shall see how penitent and humble I will be 
towards her Majesty, both in acknowledging her exceed¬ 
ing favours to -my ancestors and to myself,” (This is sar¬ 
castic, and said in irony, in reply to Buckhurst’s mis¬ 
placed suggestion of the many favours shed upon his 
predecessors and himself. Essex, doubtless, has imbibed 
from his mother’s nurture, and from his father’s death, 
different views as to these 44 favoursfor Elizabeth all 
her life persecuted Lettice Knollys and Walter Deve- 
reux. Exile and death were sad proof of favours,) 
44 whereby I doubt not, but the penitent suffering of my 
death, and sprinkling of my blood, will quench the evil 
conceited thoughts of her Majesty against me. And I 
do most humbly desire her Majesty that my death may 
put a period to my offences committed, and be no more 
remembered by her Highness. If I had ever perceived 
any of my followers to have harboured an evil thought 


THE SENTENCE. 


265 


against her Majesty, I would have been the first that 
should have punished the same, in being his executioner ; 
and therefore, I beseech you, my good lord, mistake me 
not, nor think me so proud that I will not crave her 
Majesty’s mercy with all my heart; yet I had rather die 
than live in misery.’ , 

It remains now only for sentence to be passed, which 
is done by the Lord High Steward, the judge presiding, 
which is in the usual terms, that the prisoners be hanged, 
bowelled, and quartered. 

As the court is clearing, and the peers leaving their 
places, the Earl of Essex said, “My Lord De la Warr, 
and my Lord Morley, I beseech your lordships to pardon 
me for your two sons, that are in trouble for my sake. I 
protest, upon my soul, they knew not of anything that 
was or should have been done, but came to me in the 
morning, and I desired them to stay, and they knew not 
wherefore. And so, farewell, my lords.” 

Farewell! a long farewell! yet with a noble act, well 
becoming the son of Walter Devereux ; it is still with 
remembrance of friends! This day he has shown himself 
his father’s son. When that worst hireling and basest 
Judas, Bacon, turned on him and smote him to-day, he 
says not a word of past favours, makes no charge of in¬ 
gratitude, utters no syllable of the services done him. 
Fie is silent on Bacon’s ingratitude, as his father on 
Letitia’s perfidy, and so proves himself more Christian 
than Roman. 


N 


266 


THE TREASONABLE PARASITE. 


CHAPTER XIII. 

Having seen the Earl surrendered to an early grave, there 
are some few circumstances to note before proceeding to 
comment on Bacon’s attack, on his name and fame ; 
and before alluding to that 4 Apology ’ which was intended 
to explain it, when Essex’s friends came into power. 

Anthony Bacon had continued a dependent and para¬ 
site on Essex’s bounty, living up till March, 1600, at Essex 
House, when on the 20th of that month the earl was com¬ 
mitted prisoner there under Sir Richard Berkeley. In May 
of that year a letter from the Earl of Essex to Anthony 
Bacon appeared in print. This missive had been written 
two years before, but was now published, as likely to be most 
injurious to the Earl’s fortunes. It had the desired effect, 
and exasperated the Queen in the highest degree. This, 
it is only fair to presume, was a treason of Anthony’s, in 
which, doubtless, Francis was an accomplice if not the 
abettor. They were kindred in amity and duplicity, with 
many dissimilar traits. Anthony, like Francis, seems 
capable of any craft or subtlety. They are each gifted 
with a “Manichean” subtlety. Of Anthony’s life we 
know nothing, except as revealed in his correspondence ; 
yet in this accidentally, proofs exist, that he was base and 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTER. 


267 


traitorous. As an instance—in 1596 he wrote an anony¬ 
mous letter to the newly-married Countess of North¬ 
umberland, the Earl of Essex’s sister, assailing the reputa¬ 
tion of her husband. It needs no extraordinary sense of 
honesty to perceive that this was an act of the basest and 
most despicable kind—no less cowardly than cruel and 
dishonourable. 

With no independent biography to aid us, Anthony’s 
character stands but partially exposed. His letters reveal, 
indeed, much of the temper of his mind, of his resources 
in diplomacy, his disposition for intrigue, his love of secret 
and indirect courses, as well as his very statesmanlike 
capacity. But in these he also appears his best. He 
seems at all times a gentleman somewhat indifferent in 
religious matters, leaning to Catholicism, subtle and 
secretive in manner and habits, somewhat given to light 
and loose company, spite of his lameness and ill-health. A 
polished man of the world, who is neither brave nor frank. 
His amours and vices are concealed from us. We see 
only his better and impassive half. He was not ambi¬ 
tious, therefore he had few of the unscrupulous necessities 
of his brother. But this letter gives us a glimpse, and a 
most unpleasant one too, that he was a dangerous man. 
Here it is:— 

“ Most honoured Lady,— 

“ If I could digest any injury offered you, I would 
rather conceal that which I write than trouble you with 
other’s folly, protesting I am as free from malice as to 
keep you from being abused. So it is that your lord 
hath gotten him a chamber at court, where one of his old 
acquaintance is lodged. What his meaning is I know 
not; but you may perceive he bears small respect to you, 

N 2 


268 


SATANIC VIRTUE. 


that will give occasion, if any will be so simple, as to think 
he can neglect you, for a ruined creature. Therefore, 
madam, support cheerfully yourself, with your wonted 
wisdom, and let them not unworthily disquiet your mind. 
Proportion your affection according to their deserts ; and 
consider that we are not bound by virtue to love them that 
will unloose themselves by vice. Thus much the honour 
I bear you hath inforced me to say. More I will not, 
for I am one devoted to your service, and do not conceal 
my name from shame or fear.” 

So do men’s evil deeds arise and overwhelm them to 
men’s eyes. The letter is not worth comment; but it 
needs no discernment to see that here is the protestation 
of virtue, the assertion of love and honest integrity, the 
kindly interest that Francis so well knew how at all times 
to assume. Francis Bacon, judged by his own testimony 
of himself, was the warmest and truest friend Essex ever 
had. How are we to believe it ? If his word is worth 
more than his brother’s, he dissuaded him from all his false 
steps, interceded with the Queen, pleaded for his life, and 
turned aside her royal anger at his own risk. Let it 
appear in evidence it shall be believed. I will throw no 
doubt on his story, but I will not credit it. I must have 
corroborative evidence first. In this Anthony pretends to 
devotion, to honest interest, while doing the darkest 
deed of infamy of which a civilized man can be capable. 
The destruction of the sacred confidence ’twixt husband 
and wife is the blackest act in the category of Iago’s frauds. 
But Iago was no friend to Othello. He makes no show of 
friendship. “We are not bound by virtue to love them 
that will unloose themselves by vice ” is worthy the tempter 
himself. “By vice” is the point, vice is so obnoxious to 
the honest tempter. Now it needs no such argument, or 


Anthony’s monetaky difficulties. 


269 


evidence, or suggestion; but the point naturally forces 
itself on the mind—Did Anthony Bacon spy upon 
Essex ? Did the now reigning Robert Cecil unite with 
Francis and Anthony to bring down their victim, to slay 
him by the very horns of the altar ? It may be ; Cecil and 
Francis are henceforward sworn friends. Anthony dies 
off the scene, in 1601 probably. Whether there was 
complicity in these cousins cannot now be known. No 
letters of Anthony exist after his removal from Essex 
House. Deprived of the Earl’s aid and resources he had 
already fallen into poverty. Soon after Essex’s fall at 
court, Francis wrote a begging letter for money to the 
Queen, that he might get Gorhambury into his hands, 
which his brother is compelled to part with. Whether he 
turned Judas, and united with Francis in selling his patron 
to Cecil, is a point of suspicion. That he was capable of 
such an act, the letter to the Earl’s sister is proof. Cecil 
displayed the utmost knowledge of the Earl’s affairs. 
But these things have now and for ever fallen into 
oblivion, and it is mere folly to disturb a stagnant 
pool. 

In 1598, the Earl was sent into Ireland for its pacifica¬ 
tion. He went in spite of the advice of his best friends. 
Bacon has asserted that he did most strenuously persuade 
him against the step, and as the letter is professedly written 
to dissuade him from remaining, it is probable that he did. 
Bacon was ever keen-sighted. The Earl, on the testimony 
of his enemies, and of those whose wish was father to the 
thought, and who hoped the worst was, that Essex was still 
only under a temporary cloud. We have seen that Bacon 
was still with him—did not withdraw till long after. It 


270 


Essex’s journey to Ireland. 


was therefore Bacon’s interest to keep him at court, where 
he had some influence, in preference to his remaining in 
Ireland, where he had little or none. It may well be, 
therefore, that Bacon most urgently opposed the journey. 

Cecil, no doubt, facilitated it. He was one of the first to 
be informed and to report it to one of his correspondents. 
Essex had been very recently at feud with the Queen. 
She in August, as appeared in a letter from Sir William 
Knollys, in Birch, desired his proper deference and sub¬ 
mission. This the Earl was unwilling to give. He was 
out of his element at court. He was better suited in 
every way for adventure and active service. Cecil had 
promised his aid to obtain him his wish for the viceroyalty 
of Ireland, and, it may well be believed, gave it with all his 
might and amity. The trip to Ireland cost Essex his head. 
However, it was Essex’s desire ; and his friend Robert 
Cecil, in helping him to what he wanted, was only doing a 
friendly act. A truce to the quarrel between the Queen and 
the Earl was therefore patched up in October. Mountjoy 
was talked of as Viceroy. Whether urged to it by others, 
played upon, or of his own free will, the Earl asked to be 
sent instead. The Queen hesitated and denied, as her 
custom was. Cecil added his entreaty, doubtless urging 
it by many sound reasons of state. In November, as early 
as the 6th, Cecil felt sure enough that Essex would be 
sent, to write to his friend Mr. Edmondes, that Essex 
would be chosen. Early in December he writes again, 
that the business is stopped, the Queen being averse. It 
was not settled till March the following year. In the end 
of March, 1599, he departed. Shakspere, in the chorus of 
Henry V., act 4, expressed, no doubt, the general feel- 


shakspere’s ALLUSION TO ESSEX. 


271 


ing in allusion to the gallant but ill-fated nobleman, in. 
these lines undoubtedly alluding to him,— 

“ Where now the general of our gracious empress, 

As in good time he may from Ireland coming 
Bringing rebellion broached-on his sword ? 

I trow many would the peaceful city quit 
To welcome him.” 

It is unnecessary to follow his course there, other 
than with one exception of very severe discipline it was 
marked by his usual lenity and beneficence. On the 
28th September he returned suddenly, as it was averred 
by his enemies, on a false alarm of the Queen’s death, 
issued by her commands to try his constancy and fidelity. 
Her Majesty, at the first blush, received him most gra¬ 
ciously and kindly. Before the day was out, however, 
other counsels, and perhaps other counsellors had stepped 
in, and she showed herself angry. The next day, Cecil 
called together all the enemies of the Earl to a dinner. 
On the 1st of October, Essex was committed a prisoner 
to York House. On the 21st the council recommended 
enlargement. He there became violently ill, whether 
by the same pernicious means that were then so freely 
used, that were so unscrupulously employed against 
Overbury, and that were said to have been successful 
against his father, Walter Devereux, does not appear. 
He was sick, almost to death, till far into January of the 
following year. On the 19th March he is removed a 
prisoner to Essex House under the care of Sir Bichard 
Berkeley. On the 5th of June he is tried at York House 
before eighteen commissioners. Here, for the first time, 
Bacon openly declared against him. He seized an un- 




272 THE EARL OF WORCESTER’S BELIEF. 

guarded expression of the Earl’s, which he attempted to 
torture into treason. The commissioners, spite of Bacon, 
incline to mercy, and recommend the Earl’s enlargement. 
Worcester, one of the judges, cites two verses in giving 
his verdict:— 

“ Scilicet a superio etiam fortuna luenda est, 

Nec veniam, lseso numine, casus habet.” 

“ Heaven may cast us down in our fondest fortune. 

And when a god frowns, neither necessity nor chance serve.” 

In July his imprisonment is made more lenient. 
Promptly and immediately on the news reaching Bacon, 
he sends an abject letter of apology to the Earl for his 
scandalous defection. The mean letter and its magnani¬ 
mous reply are extant. The Earl will not fly at such 
carrion, will not strike these kernes. In August, on 
the 26th, he is liberated. He remains, however, in com¬ 
plete disgrace with the Queen. An exile from the court 
and from office, and a ruined man. Broken in fame, 
health, and reputation, his enemies compassing him about 
and eager for his blood; the Queen vindictive, as was 
shown by his long imprisonment, without reasonable 
charge or accusation, and by his trial. Stung at last 
to desperation, hating life, heedless of consequences, the 
noble animal driven into the toils of the hunters leaps 
headlong upon destruction. His enemies find him fall 
an easy prey to their worst devices. He rushes madly 
where they would slowly drive. On February 8th, 1601, 
he makes his rash attempt at insurrection, the madness 
of the attempt being only to be estimated by its im¬ 
potent conclusion the same day. 

Here is, in part, Bacon’s letter of July, 1600, excusing 


CHEAP PROTESTATIONS. 


273 


his first open treason against his noble patron, and the 
Earl’s reply:— 

“ My Lord,— 

“ No man can expound my doings better than your 
Lordship, which makes me need to say the less. Only I 
humbly pray you to believe, that I aspire to the con¬ 
science and commendation of bonus civis and bonus vir , 
and that though I love some things better, I confess, than 
I love your lordship, yet I love few persons better both 
for gratitude’s sake and for your virtues, which cannot 
hurt but by accident; of which, my good affection, it may 
please your lordship to assure yourself, and of all the 
true effects and offices I can yield, &c. . . .” 

No attempt to excuse himself, but the ready protestation 
of service, the cheap and prodigal vow of affection, the 
prompt asseveration, the assumption of virtue, the pretence 
of service, and the always-at-hand flattery. Your flattery 
is a good and cheap salve, a cure-all and save-all with 
your man of wit. 

The Earl answers :— 

“ I can neither expound nor censure your late 
actions, being ignorant of all of them save one; and 
having directed my sight inwardly, only to examine 
myself. You do pray me to believe that you do only 
aspire to the 4 conscience and commendation ’ of bonus 
civis and bonus vir , and I do faithfully assure you, that 
while that is your ambition 4 though your course be active 
and mind contemplative” (In other words, though his 
words and actions do not agree, the activity being against 
and the mere protestation for me;) 44 yet we shall both, 
convenire in eodum tertio , et convenire nosipsos . Your 
profession of affection and offer of good offices are 
welcome to me.” 

What can be more magnanimous ? No abuse, no re¬ 
crimination, no assertion of the other’s base ingratitude, 


274 MORE DANGEROUS AS FRIEND THAN FOE. 


not an epithet, not a thought, no scorn, only the one 
sarcasm—keen as a Damascus blade, if the traitor have 
a soul to be struck (“ though your course be active and 
mind contemplative ”), and the quiet, calm, noble accept¬ 
ance of cheap proffers, which he alike disregards and 
despises. For great as Bacon’s abilities are, they are 
more dangerous to those they serve, than those they con¬ 
tend against, more to be feared by friends than enemies. 

In December there is a rumour that Essex will go into 
favour again; 4 4 letters have passedit is a mere rumour. 
Bacon cannot again correspond with Essex, after such 
a stinging reproach, a reproach which he can feel—for it 
takes wit to know wit—as acutely as any man. But early 
in December he writes to Lord Henry Howard to con¬ 
fute a report that he had advised the Queen to Essex’s 
ruin, to Essex’s entire destruction, and the confiscation 
of all his goods as a felon; in other words, that he ad¬ 
vised the Queen that his offence fell under a praemunire, 
and even high treason (which is death and confiscation), 
in opposition to the Lord Chief Justice and the Attorney’s 
opinion. He attributes these rumours to envy, but does 
not think the public so entrenched in good opinion of 
him that they will be deemed improbable. He cannot 
be an unlikely man, or they would not have originated; 
if they are baseless, why need he fear ? To the same 
effect he writes to Sir Robert Cecil, denying fully and 
emphatically that he has given such advice. The letter 
may have been written to be shown. Perhaps its aver¬ 
ments are true, perhaps they are not. But true or not, 
even Cecil must consider it possible that he could be guilty 
of such an act. It contains this passage : 44 For as for any 


SIR H. WOTTON’S OPINION OF ANTHONY. 


275 


violence offered to me, wherewith my friends tell me, to 
no small terror, that I am threatened, I thank God I 
have the privy coat of a good conscience ; and have a 
good while since put off any fearful care of life; or the 
accidents of life.” This is as it should be. 

In estimating the character of Bacon, and of the possi¬ 
bility of his committing certain acts or crimes, we must 
be guided by the simple laws of legal evidence: the 
general testimony of his contemporaries is evidence as to 
repute, the concurrent testimony as to specific acts is 
absolute, and as good evidence as can be furnished of 
the time. D’Ewes, Carleton, Wotton, Weldon, Cham¬ 
berlain, and others, give us a distinct insight into Bacon’s 
general repute. This last letter shows that his behaviour 
to Essex has already excited indignation and animosity; 
Weldon will, by-and-by, have reference to specific acts, 
which must be accepted. It neither becomes us to receive 
without question, nor to reject the evidence of contem¬ 
poraries or immediately succeeding historians. We are 
bound to give to the testimony its proper logical weight. 
A disposition arises in modern times to reject old His¬ 
tory and ingeniously out of hypotheses to fabricate 
new. Of the two, this is more unphilosophic than implicit 
faith. It needs no explanation to show why. It clearly 
is so. Now Wotton, in speaking of Anthony, declares 
that Anthony Bacon jewed the Earl out of Essex House; 
that having secrets of the Earl’s of a state kind in his 
hand, he threatened to betray him to the Cecils, and 
received a bribe of I,500£., and of Essex House at dif¬ 
ferent times. The story is not inconsistent with An¬ 
thony’s character. He was a deep and insidious plotter. 


276 


ITS VALUE. 


His letter to Northumberland is a proof of his nature. 
He lived at Essex House, and for some time seems 
to have been owner. It was redeemed, says Wotton, 
by Lady Walsingham, out of his hand for 2,500?. 
This is circumstantial. It is not corroborated. It is 
not inconsistent. It will not prove Anthony guilty, but 
it is entitled to provoke suspicion. Sir Henry, who is a 
most credible and trustworthy witness, and whose cha¬ 
racter is on all hands unimpeachable, avers, moreover, 
that Anthony received or drew out of Essex, besides this 
4,000?., at least 1,000?. of annual pension out of the earl, 
“ and this, too, a private and bedridden gentleman. 
What would he have gotten, if he could have gone about 
his own business ?”* What indeed, Sir Henry ! He died, 
thinks Birch, in 1599; I think later, in 1601 or 1602: 
he was certainly dead before James came in in 1603, for 
Bacon contrived to get, in June of that year, a pension 
out of the King for his brother’s services, and likewise to 
urge that he had toiled himself or tasked himself above 
his strength for the king’s service, so that he might found 
on them a claim for reward to himself. The Earl seems 
to have had little correspondence with him of late years ; 
from 1597 or 1598 none whatever. 

There are in the 4 Resuscitation ’ some letters which, 
being undated, it is impossible to assign accurately. I 
have therefore thought fit to exclude them. If written 
in the year 1600, they tell against Bacon, as proffers of 
friendship to the restored Earl. If written before, they 
are of a part with the rest. 

* ‘ Parallel between Essex and Villiers,’ by Wotton, 1641, p. 6. See 
Appendix. 


LOUD HENRY HOWARD^ TESTIMONY OF ESSEX. 277 

In addition to Francis’s letter to Lord Henry Howard 
and to Sir Robert Cecil, he addressed the Queen on 
the same subject, making capital out of the threats 
against his life. “ My life has been threatened and my 
name libelled, which I count an honourhe “ takes 
his duty too exactly, and there be some who fall a 
reckoning how many years her Majesty has reigned.” 
His letter to Lord Henry Howard speaks explicitly of a 
ruffian who has threatened his life: he alludes to the same 
report, but denies, on the ground of improbability, that 
he should give an opinion contrary to the law of the case. 
“ Resisting the imputation emphatically,” he attributes 
it to envy. He is “much bounden” to the Earl, and 
pleads, moreover, that he has “ spent more thoughts and 
time about his well-doing than ever I did about mine 
own.” Lord Henry Howard answers : 

“ You were the first that gave me notice of the rumours, 
though within two days after I heard more than I would 
of it. But as you suffer more than you deserve, so I 
cannot believe what the greedy malice of the world hath 
laid upon you. The travails of that worthy gentleman in 
your behalf, when you stood for a place of credit, the 
delight which he hath ever taken in your company, his 
grief that he could not seal up assurance of his love by 
parts, effects, and offices, proportionable to an infinite 
desire,” &c. &c. 

The Earl has been in such confirmed ill-health from the 
time of his return from Ireland till February, 1601, when 
he makes his rash attempt, that his life has been more 
than once given over by his physicians, and he has been 
once tolled for as dead. He has been a prey to pro- 


278 HEALTH MORE TO BE DESIRED THAN HOPED. 


traded disease for more than twelve months. On the 
13th December, 1599, my Lady of Essex having leave 
to visit him, found him so weak that his strength being 
gone, he is laid out on sheets, and little hopes of his 
recovery. On the 15th, eight physicians send in w T riting 
to the queen a written opinion “ salus magis optanda 
quam speranda fuit” On the 5th July, 1600, Rowland 
White writing to Sir Robert Sidney, says, that Essex is 
sick of an ague and sees nobody hut Lady Essex. On 
the 26th August, 1600, the Queen gave him his liberty 
officially, but could not see him. He writes, “ Words, if 
you can, express my hearty thankfulness, but press not, 
sue not, move not, lest passion prompt you, and I by you 
both be betrayed.” On the 9th September, and possibly 
about this time, he writes the lines— 

“ Happy were he could finish forth his fate 
In some enchanted desert, most obscure 
From all society, from love, from hate 
Of worldly folk! Then would he sleep secure ; 

Then wake again and yield God ever praise. 

Content with hips and haws and brambleberries, 

In contemplation passing still his days, 

And change of holy thoughts to make him merry. 

And when he dies his tomb may he a bush 
Where harmless robin* dwells with gentle thrush.” 

In October Chamberlain writes that his friends still hope 
that he will be restored to fame, but he believes it not, till 
he see some substantial proof. November 17th, Essex 
writes again despairingly, touchingly. Sir John Harring¬ 
ton f says: “ He shifteth from sorrow and repentance to 
rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth him de- 

* An allusion to his own name, Robin, his designation with the Queen, 
t Letter 129. Bouchier, 1853. ‘Nugae Ant.,’ 179. 


SIR JOHN HARRINGTON. 


279 


void of good reason, as of right mind. His speeches 
of the Queen become no man who hath mens sana in 
corpore sano. He hath ill advisers and mucL evil hath 
sprung from this source. The Queen well knoweth how 
to humble the haughty spirit; the haughty spirit knoweth 
not how to yield, and the man’s soul seems tossed to and 
fro, like the waves of a troubled sea.” It needs not here 
to go at length into an argument on the point, but it is 
clear from an expression in a letter to his wife written from 
Ireland, that he had no thought of treason then; that he 
retained his affection and loyalty to the Queen even to 
the last, but like many men of headstrong temper and 
strong will, was not without some intention, if fair measures 
failed, to try desperate courses, or, at any rate, to aim at 
insurrection. That he intended any hurt to her Majesty’s 
person, no one can suppose conversant with the details 
of the scheme. About Christmas, 1600, he collected the 
Puritan party about him, who had always looked to him 
as their champion, by having sermons preached at Essex 
House by eminent Puritan divines. In January the 
plotters met at Drury House, the residence of the Earl of 
Southampton, to concert measures. Their avowed intent 
was to secure access to the Queen, and so, as it were, by 
menace and show of power, to wring from her the Earl’s 
pardon, to remove his enemies, and call a parliament. 

On the 7th of February, the court, being well apprised 
from the first, sent Mr. Secretary Herbert to Essex to 
desire him to appear before the council to admonish him. 
This, and an anonymous letter, received probably the same 
day, desiring him to seek his safety in flight, precipitated 
measures. He immediately called a council of his friends. 


280 


CUFFE, ESSEX’S SECRETARY. 


That night of Saturday was spent in summoning all 
engaged in the enterprise. Of the assemblage the day 
prior the Council had been informed, and of the intended 
descent on the City ; and orders were therefore issued by 
the Queen to the Lord Mayor that no sermon should be 
preached, as usual, at St. Paul’s Cross ; that the citizens 
should keep their houses, and be in readiness to help her 
cause, if need be; that treason was contemplated; and 
that four of her ministers were next morning early to 
seek the Earl and demand his grievances, and the cause of 
this sudden mutiny. The Earl’s clear course should have 
been to have dispersed his followers and have escaped. But 
either he was mad, or weak enough to trust to the advice 
of his enemies. On the testimony of Sir Henry Wotton 
and Birch, his secretary Cuffe is declared to have insti¬ 
gated his turbulent courses.* Cuffe was a likely man ; he 
had been disgraced at college for his turbulence and 
insubordination. Sir Henry Wotton speaks of him with 
great disrespect. It is barely possible he was a tool or 
agent of Cecil’s. He had been dismissed recently, and 
taken back by the Earl, at the instance of Southampton.! 
His hanging afterwards was no proof of his innocence. 
He was, perhaps, hanged for his insincerity. Politics 
were unscrupulous, and the services of an agent over, 
he was sometimes executed, because dead men tell no 

* See Blount’s confession in Bacon’s pamphlet. 

f Birch'says, Yol. II., ‘ Memoirs of Elizabeth,’ p. 462. “ He [Cuffe] had 
been discharged some weeks before the Earl’s fatal irruption into the City, 
by his lordship’s special command, from all further attendance or access 
to him, out of an inward displeasure which the Earl had then con¬ 
ceived against the dangerous tendency of Cuffe’s suggestions and 
counsels.” 


PERVERSION OF HISTORY. 


281 


tales. Either Bagot or Montgomery were spies; Mont- 
eagle, too, possibly. Georges, there is every appearance, 
betrayed the scheme to Raleigh. It was on Leigh’s 
and Cuffe’s advice, undoubtedly, that Essex acted and 
fell. 

Mr. Dixon, reviling Essex, stigmatizes his insurrection 
as a Popish plot. To convert Blount into a Papist, and 
make him a leader, is simple enough. He was a Catholic. 
The Historian is, as usual, proudly “ independent of 
facts.” He declares Blount was at Barn Elms, when he 
was quietly living with his wife at Drayton Bassett—that he 
was filling Essex House and Barn Elms with conspirators, 
at a time that he was perfectly ignorant of the whole 
affair, and when it is absolutely certain he was elsewhere. 
Blount was Essex’s father-in-law, so far and no further 
interested in his designs: till the 20th of January he was 
ignorant of the Earl’s scheme. On the scaffold, speak¬ 
ing then with the axe about his throat, he declared 
solemnly “ that God alone knew how much he had 
dissuaded Essex.” It must be obvious to any person ever 
so slightly informed in the Earl’s habits, that to charge 
Blount with ruling or leading Essex is as absurd as to 
charge Essex with leading Bacon or vice versa. He was 
a follower only. Standing high in the Earl’s favour as a 
brave knight and true soldier, which, spite of Mr. Dixon’s 
gratuitous calumnies, his life and death showed him, but 
not otherwise honoured or considered. The Earl was the 
pillar of the Protestant cause. How, then, could it be a 
Popish plot ? The political interests of the extreme Pro¬ 
testants (that is, the Puritans) and the Catholics, were 
then, singular as it now seems, a common cause. They 


282 


‘athen^um’ rhetoric. 


were persecuted. They were the victims of a strong and 
bitter oppression. Essex was the notorious enemy of Spain, 
the head of the Catholic cause. He was the friend of the 
Protestant league in France. He was united to James 
almost wholly by his hatred and fear of the Catholic 
succession and the tie of Protestantism; and we may, 
therefore, promptly despatch all this new picturesque and 
mythical account to the limbo of useless creations and of 
mendacious things. Here is the lively narrative :— 

“ When free to plot, Essex, in the secrecy of his own 
house ” (this sounds prettily ; Mr. Dixon would describe 
Essex probably as dining in the secrecy of his own house), 
“ and in open breach of loyalty and honour, renews the 
intrigue with Rome.” (What intrigue ? when did it 
exist?) “ Blount returns from Drayton Bassett (Nov., 
1600, says Mr. Dixon) to crowd Barn Elms and Essex 
House, the Earl’s head-quarters, in or near London, with 
the most desperate of his Papist gangs.” (How very pic¬ 
turesque, for a man who did not bring a single adherent 
to the cause that the historian can show.) “ Mad at 
their loss of time, they propose to do without an army what 
they failed to do with one.” (This is a figure of speech; 
they never had an army; but this is rhetoric.) “ Enough, 
they say, to raise a troop, to kill Raleigh and Notting¬ 
ham, to seize the queen by force, and summon a parlia¬ 
ment of their own. Essex shall be swept to the throne 
by a street fight, and an act of assassination.” 

This is, of course, rhodomontade. I say of course, 
because all the book is in strict consistency. Essex never 
conceived, and therefore never renewed, an intrigue with 
Rome. Blount had no gangs. No act of assassination 


‘ATHENiEUM’ LOGIC. 


283 


was premeditated. This is the writer’s own imagining. 
New history. To the last, all the conspirators, repeatedly 
subjected to the severest examination while in prison, 
and in fear of death and of torture, protest that 
Essex’s only intention was to sue to the Queen. Urged 
on the scaffold, at the solemn moment before they are 
launched on that endless journey from which there is no 
return, and when, as man believes, his soul will stand 
before its Maker, face to face, the solitary admission 
wrung from one man is barely to the effect that, if hard 
driven, they might have done violence to the Queen. 
The premeditation of an act of assassination is a mere in¬ 
vention. The assertion “ that the miscreants were wholly 
Papists” is as false as the rest. Not a third were Papists, 
probably not a tithe of the entire number. 

“ They mean to kill the Queen : a palace murder if she 
resist them, a Pomfret murder if she yield,” says the same 
scrupulous authority. Here is the reason: “IsBlount less 
bold than Piers of Exton ? Is Essex more squeamish than 
Bolingbroke ? Equal reasoning on similar premises would 
clear up the Waterloo Bridge mystery, and convict the 
editor of the ‘ Athenaeum ’ of the whole crime. He vilifies 
Blount by calling him an impenitent ruffian. If this were 
true, it would not be courteous to a brave soldier, or become 
the Muse of history. But being most untrue, it is pitiful. 
Blount’s end was noble and manly, becoming a knight 
whose courage no man could impeach. It is impossible 
to read the narrative, even in the dry-as-dust details of 
the State Papers, without hearty sympathy, and even 
sorrow. At this point, moreover, Mr. Dixon drags in a 
statement made by one Valentine Thomas, to substantiate 


284 


VALENTINE THOMAS AN IMPOSTOR. 


the position, which has as much to do with the Essex Plot 
as with the Chartist movement of 1848. It is the decla¬ 
ration of a man that he had been bribed by the Scotch king 
to assassinate Elizabeth. Elizabeth herself never believed 
it. It has been always accepted either as the statement 
of a scoundrel anxious to ingratiate himself, or as a ruse 
adopted to injure the King of Scotland in the Queen’s eyes. 
The council disbelieved the statement altogether. They 
treated it as an invention of Thomas. He was never 
punished. It is here basely dragged in to serve a nefa¬ 
rious purpose. Georges is called “a brave and loyal 
gentleman.” Wherefore? He was a spy at worst; a 
coward and a rascal at best. He either came to Essex 
House to assist the Earl, or betray him. If to assist, he 
was the first to fly the danger, and make terms for him¬ 
self. If to betray him, his guilt is the blacker. He was 
at the time declared to be the denouncer of the plot. 
Was looked upon as a traitor to the cause. If evidence 
can prove him otherwise, it will suffice. 


bacon's character. 


285 


CHAPTER XIV. 

It is of infinitely more importance to posterity to know 
what manner of man a certain illustrious hero or man of 
mark was, than to be informed accurately on every petty 
detail of his life. It more concerns them as touching his 
estimation: it more concerns them as touching history. 
Whether Bacon was temperate or dissolute, loved or hated 
women, was prodigal or mean in his expenditure, matters 
little except to illustrate an argument. The greatest 
men have madly loved, the greatest men have been cold 
as ice. Some heroes have been prodigal, some miserly ; 
some have been temperate, some violent in intemperance 
as in all else. So far as such traits are illustrative, they 
are valuable; so far as they are not illustrative, but mere 
detail, they are objectionable. It matters, therefore, little to 
history, little to men, what are the petty details of Bacon’s 
life. We are confessedly, necessarily, ignorant. We are, 
it is true, ignorant of that which would interest, charm 
us, attract us the most, for the domestic and familiar are of 
more immediate vitality to us than the non-familiar and 
public, but for all present purposes we know enough. 





286 


ANOTHER MONARCH. 


Under James I., let it suffice to say, Bacon, by obsequious¬ 
ness and servility, has secured favour. It will be his art, 
his endeavour, to keep it. It can only be done by base 
and abject servitude. Bacon will undertake it. With 
Elizabeth the case was different. Save and except the 
flattery and homage due to the sex, the port and mien of 
a man were necessary. Bacon, albeit the task was hard, 
faced it. His letters to Elizabeth, even his begging 
letters, are not so abject as those to James, none of them. 
James demanded the utmost show of deference. As he felt 
his weakness, he desired the show of strength. Being a 
coward, he would have it seem that he was feared. This 
was necessary to inspire himself with confidence. A brave 
man is willing to meet risks as they appear. A coward will 
always, must always, seem secure, and even deceive him¬ 
self with false hopes to allay his fears. Henceforth, Bacon 
will be the most obsequious among the servile. By his 
servility he will rise, as we shall see, to be Lord Chan¬ 
cellor. But the ascent, even to servility, will be slow and 
painful. 

We have discovered already Bacon’s infirmity. There 
needs no accumulation of evidence upon that point. 
The precise measure and depth of it, however, that are to 
constitute him “ the basest of mankind ” is yet unfathomed. 
It is to be found, perchance, in his attack on Essex’s cha¬ 
racter, and in his Apology for that attack and recantation, 
when Essex’s friends came into power ; or perchance in 
Peacham’s case; or perchance in his entire attitude to¬ 
wards the people of England, as the paid and prostituted 
servant of an unconstitutional king; or perchance, in his 
abetting of Sir Giles Monpesson and Sir Francis Mitchell; 


ATTACK ON ESSEX AFTER DEATH. 


287 


or his defence of Benevolences ; or his bribery as a judge. 
Into these points we will therefore inquire. Bacon’s public 
life has no good side to it, and with his public life we are 
alone concerned ; for the problem is still “ wisest, meanest 
of mankindand are the two compatible ? 

Essex being executed, Bacon issues the same year a 
pamphlet, being ‘ A Declaration of the Practices and 
Treacheries attempted by Robert, late Earl of Essex, and 
his complices, against her Majesty and her Kingdoms.’* 

He, in this pamphlet, attempted to prove what the evi¬ 
dence at the trial could not prove—that Essex aimed at the 
crown ; that he had long plotted to take the Queen’s seat; 
that he never loved virtue nor valour in others, but where 
he thought he should be proprietary and commander of it; 
that his courtesies were like Absalom’s, with intent to 
treason, charging him with being in league with the Irish; 
that he had feigned humility to the Queen the better to 
draw her into his toils, to make her Majesty secure, and 
lull the world asleep; that he had profaned religion by 
turning inside to the Catholics and outside to the Puritans 
the better to beguile them ; that a sufficiently overt act of 
treason had been shown at the trial to justify his convic¬ 
tion, which is doubtful, for at no time was the Queen’s 
life menaced, for Sir Christopher Blount, in his last 
moments, emphatically said, “ In none of our consultations 
was there any such purpose, yet I know and must confess, 
if we had failed of our ends, we should have rather than 
have been disappointed, even have drawn blood from her¬ 
self.” So that it was an act only in possibility and not 
in contemplation, and the evidence, according to modern 
* Printed in Montagu, vol. vi., p. 299. 


288 


THE RECANTATION FOR PROFIT. 


legal usages, would not have proved even that. In 
opposition to this, and with great untruth, Bacon in his 
pamphlet declared that the Queen’s life was aimed at and 
plotted against at Drury House ; while certainly what was 
contemplated at Drury House was never carried out, and 
Essex, moreover, was not present 

The pamphlet, beyond this, attempts to prove that Cecil 
had framed to overthrow the Earl; that the Earl of Essex 
had plotted with the Irish to overthrow the throne. The 
evidence adduced was the unsupported statement of two or 
three wretched informers, not concurrent, hut to the effect 
that the “ Earl was with the Irish, and in their behalf 
that one of the deponents had heard that the Earl would be 
king of England, depositions taken twelve months before, 
and only brought forward at the trial to ruin the Earl, and 
to back up the false swearing of a notorious spy. Beyond 
this, the declaration that Essex at his execution “ did use 
vehement detestation of his offence, desiring God to forgive 
him his great, his bloody, his crying, and his infectious 
sin, and so died very penitent, but yet with great conflict, 
as it should seem, for his sins.” 

There was, it does not need to be declared, no duty 
imposed on Bacon to disseminate this tract—no need in 
him to write it. Like his advocacy, it was a gratuitous 
service, given because no man else was at hand base 
enough to undertake it; because he hoped to gain favour 
with the Queen; because he wished, to some extent 
perhaps, to justify himself by slander to the people. But 
the measure of his iniquity was not complete. After James 
came to the throne, he published a recantation to ingra¬ 
tiate himself with the king. A pamphlet which utterly re- 


bacon’s apology fob HIS ATTACK ON ESSEX. 289 


pudiates, not merely bis treason to Essex, but disclaims 
44 the declaration of the treasons and practices.” Pistol 
himself eats not his leek with more appetite. It is in the 
form of a letter addressed to the Earl of Devonshire, Lord 
Lieutenant of Ireland. 

In this 4 Apology,’ for the first time, he discovers grief for 
the fortune of Essex, and sets forth how deeply he worked 
with the Queen to procure Essex’s reinstatement in her 
Majesty’s good graces. He declares 44 that he knit 
Anthony’s service to be at the Earl’s disposing,” which 
was contrary to the proof, and certainly in opposition to 
Anthony’s statement. That he had at all times advised 
with the Earl for his good, and pleaded with the Queen 
in his behalf, all of which being unsupported testimony, 
not corroborated by facts, but to some extent disproved 
by known truths and circumstances, as well as being the 
exceedingly interested statement of a most unprincipled 
man, must be taken at their worth. 

In this declaration he, as usual, is prompt to show his 
own exceeding virtue. 44 For every honest man that hath 
his heart well planted will forsake his King rather than 
forsake God, and forsake his friend rather than forsake 
his King; and yet will forsake any earthly commodity, 
yea, and his own life in some cases, rather than forsake his 
friend.” Again : 44 1 protest before God ” I did not enter 
service with my lord of Essex 44 as the likeliest means of 
my own advancement, hut because I loved my country 
more than answerable to my fortune ; and I held at that 
time my Lord to be the fittest instrument to do good to 
the state.” 


o 


290 


dido’s LOVE FOPw 2ENEAS. 


Such are the ways of courtiers, such is the attitude of a 
man who will rise, spite of honour, honesty, or truth, and 
who is ambitious to be great. 

Well may the Psalmist desire the middle course, and 
neither poverty nor riches. 

In 1601, in October, after Essex’s death, Elizabeth 
called her last Parliament. Her life is fast ebbing away. 
All historians nearly have concurred in declaring that 
Essex’s death sat heavy on her soul, and that she never 
recovered it. Some persons have affected to doubt this, 
but without reason. Mr. Dixon, of course, will settle the 
matter. The Queen at once decided on Essex’s death— 
would have him executed, and cared nothing for him. If 
the facts are against such an inference, it is unlucky for 
the facts, not for the positive conclusion. Facts must 
give way. The Queen did show much indecision about his 
punishment; pined away after his execution ; seemed to 
know no peace of mind after. There exists abundance of 
trustworthy testimony as to her grief, indecision, and 
misery before, and as to her violent sufferings, after 
his death. Unhappy sovereign! she was much to be 
pitied, for she was a mere tool in the hands of Cecil, 
Raleigh, Nottingham, the Earl’s enemies. 

In October, 1601, Sir John Harrington says: “The 
Queen was reduced to a skeleton; altered in her features ; 
her taste for dress gone ; nothing pleased her. She stamped 
and swore violently at the ladies of the court, whom she 
tormented beyond measure. In December, 1602, being 
with the Queen, she asked him if he had ever seen Ty¬ 
rone. He answered that he had once seen him with the 


dido’s GRIEF FOR .ENEAS. 


291 


lord-deputy (Essex?). She looked up with grief and 
choler in her countenance, # and said, in substance, 6 1 
recollect you saw him elsewhere/ and, dropping a tear, 
smote her bosom.” In May and June, 1602, the Queen 
told De Beaumont that she was tired of life, that nothing 
now contented her. She talked to him of Essex with 
sighs, almost with tears. De Beaumont, finding the con¬ 
versation moved her so much, changed it. Birch quotes a 
letter in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, which has this 
passage: u She sleepeth not so much by day as she used, 
neither taketh rest by night. Her delight is to sit in the 
dark, and sometimes with shedding tears to bewail Essex.” 
In the State Paper Office there is a letter by Chamberlain, 
which substantiates the position that she died from grief, 
and not from decay of nature, March 30, 1603. “ I find 

her disease nothing but a settled and irremovable melan¬ 
choly.” 

Poor Queen! she obstinately refused medicine, though 
told it would cure her. She settled down into sad 
and gloomy silence. Like Dido, already wandering 
among the shades, with a persuasion that if she lay once 
down she would never rise. Here is an account in 
French, said to be a postscript of Sir Dudley Carleton’s : 
“ Ont quelque autre repentement secret, que l’on attribue 
au regret de la mort du feu Comte d’Essex, l’eussent 
esmene a la chercher ou ddsirer elle-meme. Quoy que ce 
soit, c’est la verite que des lors qu’elle sentit atteinte, elle 
diet en vouloir mourir.” 

On the 9th of March the Countess of Nottingham died. 
The Queen took her death much to heart. On the 24th 
* ‘Nugse Antiquse,’ 1, 322, vol. ii. 506. 

o 2 


292 


ALTEEED NOTIONS OF EQUITY. 



of the same month her mistress followed her, never having 
rallied since that lady’s death. 

On the 27th of October, 1601, parliament was called. 
Bacon is elected for Ipswich and St. Albans, but 
“ maketh choice to stand ” for Ipswich, another burgess 
being appointed for St. Albans. On the 5th November 
he introduces a bill “ for suppressing deceits in weights 
and measures/’ which, on a second reading on the 7th, 
was quashed. This is his concession to popularity. But 
in this Parliament he bids high for the Queen’s favour. 
He is no longer the tribune of the people; no longer 
opposed to subsidies. He will go further in servitude than 
the boldest. The supply to the Queen is greater than ever 
was suggested before, but Bacon will support it. No talk 
of selling pots and pans. The poor and the rich must 
equally pay. He ridicules the idea of exempting the 
poor, the three-pound men. His answer is “ dulcis trac- 
tus pari jugo.” 

Sir Francis Raleigh is the proposer of the subsidy; he 
is to some extent the friend of Bacon, but he cannot for¬ 
bear a sarcasm on the altered tone of the member for 
Ipswich. He answers Bacon with two shafts out of his 
own quiver. “ ‘ Dulcis tractus pari jugo,’ says an honour¬ 
able person. Call you this par jugum, when a poor man 
pays as much as a rich ? and, peradventure, his estate is 
no better than he is set at; when our estates, that be 
30/. or 40/. in the Queen’s books, are not the hundredth 
part of our wealth ; therefore it is not dulcis nor pari.”* 

But in this parliament arose a debate on a comparatively 
new word, “ prerogative,” which within the next twenty 
* D’Ewes, 633. 


MONOPOLIES 


293 


or thirty years will be heard frequently enough. The 
word is old enough in origin, but has fallen into disuse. 
It means little more than arbitrary dispensation with the 
law. During the next few years it will be heard again 
and again, when men wish to overturn the law, or override 
justice with authority. Bacon at once displays his 
altered sentiments toward Majesty. The question of 
prerogative, of the sufficiency of the Queen’s dignity to 
absolve her from legal responsibility, is to arise on a 
scandalous abuse, which has grown within the last thirty 
years to a pernicious and dangerous extent, viz., of 
granting licences, patents, or monopolies for the manufac¬ 
ture of certain goods, for their importation and sale. In 
place of rewarding a favourite, as was possible in feudal 
times, with a castle or grant of land, from which some 
hereditary enemy, or some weak vassal or widow was dis¬ 
possessed, the Queen now, since the sixteenth year of 
her reign, has granted licences to plunder her people; but 
in a perfectly civil and authoritative form, which has been, 
in consequence, submitted to. Thus Essex had been 
permitted to retail all the currants consumed in the realm, 
taking toll to the tune of more than fifty per cent. 

The evil is not yet brought sensibly home to the popu¬ 
lation; for while the infliction is in gross, it is not 
regarded. If the tax-gatherer stood at the door of each 
petty shop, and demanded, with show of authority, fifty 
per cent, on every purchase after it had been com¬ 
pleted, there would have been riot long enough. But 
the truth is slowly permeating the population, that the 
use is in itself an abuse of power—that it is made 
even more scandalous in practice than in principle; 


294 THE ORIGIN OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT. 


the monopolists perverting the law to their own ends, 
by means of general warrants, which enable them to com¬ 
mit men to prison, or deprive them of their goods, without 
trial. The tyranny has become unbearable. By-and-by 
the word “monopoly ” and the word “ prerogative” coupled 
together will shake a Kingdom to its base; for in this 
Parliament of 1601, in this debate on monopoly, in this 
speech of Francis Bacon’s, is the little cloud no bigger 
than a man’s hand which will presently compass the 
whole of this Empire of England. For here the motion is, 
for the first time, to proceed by bill, not by petition—to 
arrogate a right to legislate, not to ask as a favour. It is 
the first of a long series of absolute conflicts in parliament, 
which shall end in a King executed at Whitehall, in the 
assertion of a whole people of a right, above the right 
divine of Kings, and in a precedent for the universe. 

Debates touching the Royal prerogative have occurred 
before. But never since the Tudors came to the throne 
has so fierce an attack been made in the cause of justice 
and liberty, on the usurpations of the crown. This is a 
debate, of which the conclusion shall be the Petition of 
Right, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Act 
of Settlement; for all these have at their basis the right of 
every man to be exempt from arbitrary exaction, and the 
assertion of the 29th Chapter of Magna Charta, the 9th 
of Henry III., u That no free man is to be imprisoned, 
or injured, or disseised, that is, deprived of his goods or 
chattels, without a trial by his equals.” 

Mr. Spicer, the member for Warwick, is the first to 
rise. “ This assembly has a free mind and a free tongue. 
What is a monopoly ? A restraint of anything public to 




FREEDOM OF DEBATE. 


295 


a private use. The substitutes (deputy monopolists 
licensed by the great monopolist or his agents) had been 
to Warwick and called every man, who sold aqua vitae and 
vinegar, to the council chamber, stopping the sale of both 
these commodities. The Queen’s warrant gave four 
months’ liberty to the subject to sell both vinegar and 
brandy, but within two months this substitute comes down, 
and instead, moreover, of taking them before a justice of 
the peace, to be bound in their recognizances, he taketh a 
private bond, retaining power in his own hands to kill or 
save. Her Majesty’s commission being transgressed, as a 
sworn servant to her Majesty, I hold myself bound to 
certify the house thereof.” 

Straightway Mr. Bacon rises : the injustice, the cruelty, 
the subversion of law have no enmity in him. He hopes 
the prerogative of the Queen will never be discussed. The 
Queen can set aside verdicts in criminal cases.* “ I say, 
and I say again, that we ought not to deal, to judge, or 
meddle with her Majesty’s prerogative. I wish every 
man, therefore, to be careful in this business.” In the 
course of his speech he suggests that the Queen should be 
petitioned; that whereas this was a bill, and that the use 
hath ever been to humble ourselves before her Majesty, 
concluding by protesting that he did his duty to the 
Queen by speaking in her behalf, and in protesting 
that he had also “ delivered his conscience ” “ in saying 
what he had said ”—that very Joseph Surface-like con¬ 
science. 

* By a “Non Obstante,” reversing the decision. D’Ewes, 643. In 
the ‘ Parliamentary History,’ p. 925, the report is more full, and Bacon 
alludes to himself as the Queen’s Attorney-general, and therefore 
bound to this course. 


296 


THE SCANDALOUS MONOPOLIES. 


Several speakers rise in succession to declare the 
enormity of the abuse. Mr. Francis Moore, a very active 
member of the House, and one of the ablest men of busi¬ 
ness of the day, who has even more than Bacon the ear of 
the House, declares that monopolies bring the general 
profit into a private hand, and the end of all is beggary 
and bondage to the subject. “And to what purpose is it to 
do by parliament when the Queen will undo the same by 
prerogative ?” 

Mr. Martin is even stronger. “ I do speak for a town 
that grieves and pines, for a country that groaneth and 
languisheth under the burthen and unenviable substitutes, 
to the monopolists of starch, tin, fish, cloth, oil, vinegar, 
salt, and I know not what. The principal commodities, 
both of my town and country, are ingrossed into the hand 
of those bloodsuckers of the commonwealth.” Sir Walter 
Raleigh, who “ blushed ” when one of the speakers, Mr. 
Bennet, alluded to a monopoly of cards, which was one of 
those he held, rises to defend the monopoly of tin, which, 
as Lord Warden of the Stannary, he held. He also charges, 
with his usual tact, that an imputation of slander has 
been cast upon her Majesty, trying by this means to 
silence the opposition. The ruse having so far the effect, 
that no one rises for some time after he has taken his 
place, till one of the members, Sir Francis Hastings, rose 
to express a hope that anything that had been said amiss 
should be attributed rather to hastiness than want of duty. 
In the afternoon of the following day, Saturday the 
21st, the House met in committee. 

Sir Edward Hoby, Bacon’s relative, opens. Salt, in 
his county, that was wont to be sold at sixteen pence a 



THEIR REVOCATION. 


297 


bushel, is now sold for fourteen or fifteen shillings; but 
the Lord President, on complaint, had committed the 
patentee, and it had fallen again to the old price. 

Mr. Francis Bacon .—“ The bill is very injurious and 
ridiculous ; injurious, in that it taketh, or rather sweepeth 
away her Majesty’s prerogative; and ridiculous, because 
it does not extend to corporations.” 

On the 25th November, so unanimous and so much in 
earnest was the House, that the Queen gave notice the mo¬ 
nopolies should be revoked. During the discussion several 
violent scenes of passionate debate and earnest expostula¬ 
tion had taken place, which were a presage of some that 
were to follow on the same subject hereafter. The excite¬ 
ment, both within and without doors (spite of there being 
no reporters), was very great, the members who had stood 
up for Prerogative being coughed down, and the cry being 
raised out of doors, “ God prosper those that overthrow 
these monopolies! God send the prerogative touch not 
our liberty !” 

In annulling these obnoxious patents, the concession 
made by royalty was made so handsomely, the revocation 
was so graceful and entire; her Majesty protesting that 
she was as much obliged by her servants’ care, and grati¬ 
fied as they could be, that it stripped this great triumph 
of Parliament, of half of its honours of conquest. Other¬ 
wise it was the greatest and most signal manifestation 
of parliamentary and constitutional power, during her 
reign—the chief victory even in the space of more than 
a century. 

The evil aimed at was monstrous. It was compara¬ 
tively of modern growth. For though similar grants had 

o 3 



298 


THE CHANGE OF OPINION. 


been made since the days of feudalism, the parliament 
of Edward III., in the tenth year of his reign, de¬ 
clared all monopolies void and illegal. The system 
had been revived, as we have seen, in the sixteenth 
year of Elizabeth’s reign, and had now grown to a 
monstrous head, including almost every household neces¬ 
sity—currants, coals, iron, salt, oil, bones, leather, cloth, 
indeed almost every element which enters into the comfort 
or convenience of man. In Bacon’s defence we have 
seen that he is prepared absolutely, to defend this perni¬ 
cious and unpopular abuse, in hope of office. For if it be 
urged that he is in some sort, as being befriended by the 
Queen, and as one of her counsel, bound to answer for her, 
yet the answer which lies against his Volunteer advocacy 
against Essex, serves here also. It is not necessary that he 
should do it. It is not even part of his duty. He could 
not only without disgrace avoid it, but it is a peculiar 
dishonour in him to defend it. But he not only does 
support it, but exceeds in his partisanship all others on the 
same side. Sir Robert Cecil is the Queen’s represent¬ 
ative ; but he will not go so far. Bacon is prepared to 
“ conscientiously ” qualify himself in servility for his cour- 
tiership, and his lukewarmness is now no longer to be 
suspected. 





THE ACCESSION OF ESSEX’S FRIEND. 


299 


CHAPTER XV. 

Essex has been now two years and more dead. He is 
as good as forgotten. The Scotch King has come to the 
throne. Bacon’s courtiership must now turn. Ele prose¬ 
cuted Essex for plotting with Scotland ; and now, by a 
turn in the wheel, Queen Elizabeth is dead, Scotland and 
James are triumphant. Something must be done to 
remedy mistakes, and that promptly. Essex is thought 
by James to be his martyr; but Essex cannot be raised 
to life. So the shifting courtier sits down and writes. 
Whom shall he address ? 

There is a Mr. Fowlys, or Foulis, afterwards Sir 
David Foulis of Ingleby, a favourite of King James, an 
old correspondent of Anthony’s, a man great at James’s 
court, and who is sent with letters, being a person of 
trust, to the various lords of the privy council. He may 
be useful to him. Bacon writes, March 23rd, 1603:— 

“ Sir,— 

“ The occasion awaketh in me the remembrance 
of the constant and mutual good offices which passed be¬ 
tween my good brother and yourself; whereunto (as you 
know) I was not altogether a stranger. But well do I 
bear in mind the great opinion which my brother (whose 
judgment I much reverence) would often express to me of 



300 


TOUTING FOR FAVOUR. 


your extraordinary sufficiency, dexterity, and temper, 
which he had found in you in the business and service of 
the king, our sovereign lord. This latter bred in me 
an election, as the former gave an inducement for me to 
address myself to you, and to make this signification of 
my desire, towards a mutual entertainment of good affec¬ 
tion and correspondence between us; hoping that both 
some good effect may result of it, towards the king’s 
service ; and that for our particulars, though occasion 
give you the precedence of furthering my being known, 
by good note unto the king, so no long time will inter¬ 
cede, before I, on my part, shall have some means given 
to requite your favour, and to verifie your commendation. 
And so, with my loving commendations, good Mr. Foulis, 
1 leave you to God’s goodness. From Gray’s Inn, the 
27th of March, 1603.”* 

Let us analyze this letter for a moment. The occasion 
reminds him of the services done by his brother for the 
King, no less than of his friendship with Mr. Fowlis; yet 
he has helped meanwhile to bring Essex to the scaffold 
for those very services. He then proceeds grossly to 
flatter Mr. Fowlis, and presently to work on his cupidity 
or selfishness, particularly indicating how he may be 
served, by being made of good note or repute with the 
King, and that on Mr. Fowlis accomplishing so much, 
Bacon will requite him. It would be hardly possible to 
pen a meaner or more base epistle. But this is not 
enough. Before to-morrow has passed he launches 
another:— 

“ Sir,— 

“ I did write unto you yesterday by Mr. Lake 
(who was despatched hence from their lordships) a letter 
of reviver of those old sparks of former acquaintance 

* Three days after the Queen’s death. Montagu dates this letter the 
25th, or the next day. 



LETTERS ON THE ACCESSION. 


301 


between us, in my brother’s time; and now, upon the 
same confidence, finding so fit a messenger, 1 would not 
fail to salute you; hoping it will fall out so happily, as 
that you shall be one of the king’s servants, which his 
Majesty will first employ here with us ; where I hope to 
have some means not to be barren in friendship towards 
you. 

“We all thirst after the King’s coming, accounting all 
this but as the dawning of the day, before the rising of 
the sun, till we have his presence. And though now his 
Majesty must be James Bifrons, to have a face to Scot¬ 
land as well as to England, yet “ Quod nunc instat agen¬ 
dum.” The expectation is here that he will come in state, 
and not in strength. So for this time I commend you to 
God’s goodness. 28th March, 1603.” 

Here he shows his hope that Fowlis will be one of the 
King’s servants. The phrase “ come in state, and not in 
strength ” will do good service again. In the life of 
Henry VII., written to please James, he uses the same 
phrase to flatter James indirectly in the person of his wise 
ancestor. He takes up his pen and writes to Sir Thomas 
Chalmer, the tutor of King James’s eldest son, Prince 
Henry, begging him, turning the esteem in which Bacon 
holds him to “ further his Majesty’s good conceit and 
inclination towards mealthough occasion gives prece¬ 
dence to Sir Thomas in the power to do good offices, “ yet 
he will requite him.” Then to Mr. Davis, a favourite of 
King James, afterwards Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, 
commending himself to Mr. Davis’s love and all those 
“ good offices which the vivacity of your wit can suggest 
to your mind.” Then to Mr. Robert Kempe ; then to the 
great Earl of Northumberland, offering his pen and 
service ; then to the Earl of Southampton, who is still in 
the Tower, “ presenting his humble service,” and assuring 



302 


MOEE INFAMY. 


his lordship that, doubtful as it may seem, “ it is true as 
a thing that God knoweth ” that no difference is wrought 
in him by the change of affairs, than that “ I may safely 
be now , that which I was truly before ,” and signing 
himself “ your lordship’s humble and most devoted.” 
'No degradation is, in truth, too great; the lowliest 
he will apply to, even those whom he has most deeply 
injured. 

He proceeds in his labours, for his energy is unfailing, 
and writes to every one, friend or foe, whom he believes, 
directly or indirectly, can procure him advancement, 
deterred neither by chance of rebuff, by the indecorum of 
pressing a suit on persons he has wronged, or by the igno¬ 
minious character of the person whose aid he seeks. 
Among the letters thus preserved, are a letter to the Earl 
of Northumberland, to Lord Kinloss, to Morrison, a 
Scotch physician, and to his Majesty himself, lauding his 
glories to the skies; to the Earl of Salisbury, presenting a 
book (‘ The Advancement of Learning ’) ; then to the in¬ 
famous Pander the Earl of Northampton (also with a 
book),, declaring the new monarch the most learned King 
that ever reigned, and noble as the Edwards, and this 
with protestations of affection to a peer who was privy to the 
Overbury murder, who held the candle for Somerset to 
debauch his own grand-niece, the Countess of Essex, wife 
of the third Earl, to gain his own ends and advancement— 
a courtier equal to Bacon’s self in duplicity and craft. 
Unluckily, these letters bear no date, so that we can only 
approximately declare that they were written promptly on 
the accession in 1603, His letter to the king is a master¬ 
piece of policy:— 


LETTER TO THE KING. 


303 


bacon’s letter to the king on his accession. 

44 It may please your most excellent Majesty, 

“ It is observed upon a place in the Canticles by 
some, 4 Ego sum flos campi et lilium convallium ’ that 
a 4 dispari,’ it is not said 4 Ego sum flos horti, et lilium 
montium,’ because the majesty of that person is not enclosed 
for a few, nor appropriate to the great. And yet, not¬ 
withstanding this royal virtue of “access, which nature and 
judgment hath planted in your Majesty’s mind, as the 
portal of all the rest, could not of itself (any imperfections 
considered) have animated me to have made oblation of 
myself immediately to your Majesty, had it not been joined 
to a habit of the like liberty, which I enjoyed with my 
late dear sovereign mistress—a princess happy in all things 
else, but most happy in such a successor. And yet farther, 
and more nearly, I was encouraged, not only upon a sup- 
posal, that unto your Majesty’s sacred ears (open to the air 
of all virtues) there might come some small breath, of the 
good memory of my father, so long a principal counsellor 
in your kingdom; but also by the particular knowledge 
of the infinite devotion and incessant endeavours (beyond 
the strength of his body and the nature of the times) which 
appeared in my good brother towards your Majesty’s service.” 
(This, insomuch as we have seen, that one of the charges 
against Essex which Bacon pushed upon him, was service 
to the Scotch king, is a bold stroke, especially founding his 
brother’s illness upon it, or making claim by it, but the 
next stroke is a bolder.) 44 And were, on your Majesty’s 
part, through your singular benignity, by many most 
gracious and lively significations and favours accepted and 
acknowledged, beyond the merit of anything he could 
effect, which endeavours and duties, for the most part, 
were common to myself unto him, though by design as 
(between brethren) dissembled. And therefore, most high 
and mighty King, my most dear and dread sovereign lord, 
since now, the corner stone is laid of the mightiest 
monarchy in Europe; and that God above, who hath a 
hand in bridling the floods and motions of the seas, hath, 




304 


ABJECT AND PROFANE PROFESSIONS. 


by the miraculous and universal consent (the more strange, 
because it proceedeth from such diversity of causes in your 
coming in) given a sign and token of great happiness in 
the continuance of your reign; I think there is no subject 
of your Majesty’s, which lovetli this island, and is not 
hollow and unworthy, whose heart is not set on fire, not 
only to bring you peace offerings to make you propitious, 
but to sacrifice himself a burnt offering—a holocaust to 
your Majesty’s service. Amongst which number no man’s 
fire shall be more pure and fervent than mine. But how 
far forth it shall blaze out, that resteth in your Majesty’s 
employment. So thirsting after the happiness of kissing 
your royal hand, I continue ever.” 

It is letters similar to this in manner and character 
which compose nearly all Lord Bacon’s correspondence. 
They show at least that Lord Bacon’s tone of morality or of 
honesty was not high ; that his motives were base and per¬ 
sonal ; that he consulted the means little that tended to 
his own ends ; and that he differed as much from ordinary 
men in the unscrupulous manner in which he sought 
advancement, as in his great mental attributes. If it is 
urged, on the other hand, that other courtiers did the same, 
though this cannot be held to be an excuse, for it cannot 
excuse the ablest, that the most abject should pursue “ Arts 
by honesty avoided,” yet even this is untenable. No letters 
of a similar kind, from the other conspicuous statesmen of 
the times exist. If they wrote them, surely some such 
would be forthcoming; but it cannot be, that they will 
ever be produced, for they never were written. Bacon 
stood alone in servility and cunning, the most abject of the 
abject, the basest of the base. 

The Queen died March 24, 1603. Bacon’s letters pro¬ 
duce the desired result. He is placed—through Cecil’s 


BACON ACCEPTED BY THE KINO. 


305 


intercession and his own active energy. His services are 
accepted, but not without distrust. He is appointed 
King’s counsel; his pleadings with Lord Henry Howard, 
with Mr. Fowlis, Mr. Chalmers, with the Monarch, have 
availed. Once engaged, as he knows, his prospects are 
sure. He is the man for James. James has a love of 
scholars and students—is inclined to peace. He will 
have obsequious servants, who are ready to prostrate 
themselves before him. Bacon is a scholar, a man of 
peace, and a pliant and servile servant. 

As early as July, after the king’s establishment on the 
throne, we find Bacon is anxious to be knighted. The 
King is very free with the title; it is a source of profit to 
him. But the honour is so doubtful that some persons 
have, for the purpose of bleeding them, to be coerced 
into its acceptance. Bacon is not of these; he has fixed 
his eye on a certain alderman’s daughter, with a very 
handsome jointure. In his wretchedly poverty-stricken 
condition, he is compelled to pawn some of his jewels even 
for so small a sum as 50 1* There is no doubt, her 
large fortune—10,000?.,t equal to 90,000?. or 100,000?. 
at the present day—is a handsome consideration, and 
came most opportunely to relieve his necessities. On 
this point Lord Campbell, agreeing with Macaulay, with 
his usual accuracy, says :—“ I am afraid this was a match 
of mere convenience, and not very auspicious.” This 
is his lordship’s solitary comment, and no belief could 
be more just or well-founded. Bacon is forty-two—cer¬ 
tainly not too old to love; but an age when the passions 
in men, and such men as Bacon was, wait upon their 

* * Egerton Papers,’ 395. 

t Wotton calls it “ an immense sum in those days,” vol. i. p. 183. 



306 THE LATE LORD CHANCELLOR CHIDDEN. 


prudence. He is desperately in debt; has possibly, 
from a reference in one of his letters, “ because of this 
late disgrace,’" been again arrested. Not a tittle of 
evidence exists that his married life was in any respect 
happy; there is no allusion to his wife in his writings; 
there are no letters to and from her preserved. From 
these facts, from the fact that Bacon was married either in 
July or August, and redeemed on the 21st of that month 
a Jewel of Sussanna made of gold, set with diamonds and 
rubies, out of pawn from Lord Ellesmere, it is quite 
admissible that Lord Campbell should say it looked more 
like a marriage of convenience than love. 

On this, and on his first love, Lady Hatton, the editor of 
the ‘ Athenaeum,’ with his usual accuracy, says:—“ Francis 
falls into love ; Lord Campbell thinks he only falls into 
debt. That being desperately poor, he made a bold at¬ 
tempt to restore his position by matrimony.” “ This is 
merely,” says the great Critic, “ in Bantam’s vein. When 
one doesn’t know, asks the cockfighter, is it not natural to 
think the worst ?” Mr. Dixon is witty at the late Chan¬ 
cellor’s expense, with but small reason, however. 

Lady Hatton was a shrew, but was notoriously rich. 
Bacon was then thirty-seven years old, placeless, briefless, 
and in debt—an author without repute, a lawyer without 
practice. The conclusion was, if not obvious, certainly fair. 
With respect to this second love affair, Mr. Dixon again 
attacks the late Chancellor, hoping some day to receive 
notice—even a rebuke would be treasured. “ Lord Camp¬ 
bell takes everything on trust.He makes merry 

over his (Bacon’s) mercenary love and marriage of conve¬ 
nience and then the great Censor proceeds with a page 
of grandiloquent verbiage, to show his superior knowledge 



FRANCIS BACON’S MARRIAGE. 


307 


of the subject, who the lady was, what was her jointure, 
but particularly who was her father-in-law, on whom we 
have some dozen or twenty pages lavished. 

Mr. Dixon had stumbled over a book called ‘ Wotton’s 
Baronetage.’ Herein is his store of learning concealed. 
His research into the family of Francis Bacon’s wife went 
so far as to copy several pages of this. The fidelity was 
commendable. But wherefore this cackling, unless on the 
principle of the solitary chick, which gives such delight to 
the parental bosom ? Mr. Dixon is proud of his one fact. 
The single truth of his volume. He is, however, com¬ 
pelled to mar it. Wotton declares the lady had for her 
dower “ an immense sum ” in those days. 

Mr. Dixon alters this fact. He would have us believe 
her poor and all but portionless. That the marriage was 
of love, and not of convenience. Yet it must remain very 
doubtful that it was so, with such manifest reasons to the 
contrary. But wherefore all this talk about Lady Bacon’s 
father-in-law, and none about the lady? Mr. Dixon 
neither tells us if she was fair or stout, or short or tall, or 
witty, or clever, or domesticated; how she was dressed, 
spent her time, or when or where she died even. Such 
neglect is surely culpable in so accurate an historian. 
The public don’t care anything for lusty Pakington, he 
was no relative; but they do care something about Lady 
Bacon. But the oracle is mute ; it is very perplexing. 

Having gained the object of his ambition, and married ; 
having been made a knight at his own request, to enable 
him to marry her, and that he might not be outfaced by 
three other knights at his own mess, Bacon is no nearer 
the goal of his hopes. He has been accepted, to some 



308 


COURTIER-LIKE ARTS, 


extent, into favour, but he is still under a cloud. He was 
one of the persecutors of Essex. It is now most probable 
that he wrote his 4 Apology ’ for the infamous part he took 
in that transaction He prayed to be knighted alone, but 
this favour was denied ; so he received “ the prostituted 
honour ” in company with 300 others. Among them no 
doubt his money-lender, Mr. Michael Hickes. He was 
engaged, says Lord Campbell, in Raleigh’s trial; but 
Sir Dudley Carleton expressly says that none but Coke, 
Heale, and Phillips were employed, and this is possibly 
accurate. The State Trials do not refer to him on this 
occasion. But again a Parliament is to be called, and 
distinction reaped by his Eloquence. 

In this session he again appears as the advocate of the 
court, and as one of those anxious for the King’s pet 
scheme of the union of England with Scotland. On the 
25th of the succeeding August, after parliament is pro¬ 
rogued, he receives his reward, by being appointed king’s 
counsel, with a salary of 40?. per annum, and with an 
additional grant, in answer to his begging letter, of 60?. 
per annum for the services of his brother Anthony. He 
has therefore gained by his show of obedience. Cecil and 
he now work in unison ; and Robert Cecil, having treason¬ 
ably practised with Scotland during the time of Elizabeth, 
and at the very time Essex was brought to the scaffold 
for dealing with Ireland, is now again in power, and Bacon 
is likely to thrive. 

The better to keep his name before the King, and to 
conciliate and flatter his august sovereign, he published 
this year a tract “ On the Union of the Two Kingdoms 
a letter addressed to the King, “ On the true greatness 


‘THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEAKNING.’ 


309 


of the Kingdom of Britainand a letter to Lord Elles¬ 
mere, no doubt to be shown to the monarch, suggesting a 
History of England. These, however, were not answered 
on the instant, for he was passed over in an appointment 
of solicitor-general this year, not receiving his reward for 
three or four years. 

In the year 1605 he published the first of his nobler 
literary labours—his book, 4 On the Advancement of Learn¬ 
ing, 7 the result of many years’ persistence and cogitation. 
And which now came opportunely as a present to dedicate 
to a monarch so proud of his scholarly acquirements, so 
inclined by taste and inclination to foster literature. 

Coke had all this time triumphed over Bacon. He had 
been a fortunate suitor for Lady Hatton’s hand; he had 
passed through the grades of solicitorship and attorney- 
ship ; had partly no doubt from inherent antagonism of 
nature, partly from a disposition overbearing and harsh, 
and something from jealousy of Bacon’s superior gifts of 
eloquence and his greater literary attainments, been his 
bitter and unforgiving enemy. There can be little doubt 
that Coke despised Bacon as a lawyer; that he knew 
Bacon’s attempt to depreciate his services and to slander 
him when competitors for the same place ; and that he 
had reviled him as “the Huddler.” Coke was not a 
man to forget a wrong. Implacable in all things, he was 
not likely to be vacillating, or doubtful, in his animosities. 

Coke has been called narrow-minded. If a great 
lawyer can be narrow-minded, perhaps he was. But the 
terms are contradictions; for that common sense, logical 
accuracy, precision of reasoning, and nobility of sentiment 
which make a man great in law—without which no man 



310 


THE LAW OF FREEDOM. 


can be great in law—were great in Coke. He was 
narrow-minded in his adhesion to one pursuit; he turned 
neither to the right nor to the left in anything he under¬ 
took. He saw one end and one aim, and that in all things 
he pursued. This temper made him the greatest lawyer 
of his or of any other age. Not the greatest philosophic 
lawyer, but the greatest lawyer of practice—of practical 
utility. His knowledge of law was as practical and utili¬ 
tarian as Bacon’s philosophy. And so it remains, and will 
ever remain, the backbone of the legal system of this 
realm. Those who call him a bigot, or narrow-minded, 
can never have weighed well his gloss on Magna Charta. 
It is a more glorious monument than the ‘ Novum Orga- 
numat any rate I unhesitatingly confess I would sooner 
be the author of one than of the other. It asserts in an 
age of despotism, the noblest Maxims, of civil and religious 
liberty. It lays down, not as new ideas, without weight, 
or age, or precedent, principles which no succeeding genera¬ 
tion of men can afford to despise, which no nation can 
ignore, which no men, aspiring to be free, can do better 
than preserve. As long as Coke’s law is upheld, the 
people who uphold it must be free. No nation can be 
grand enough to forget it. Therefore Coke was not 
narrow-minded in one sense of the phrase—his notions 
were in the highest degree liberal. On the freedom of the 
subject, on the liberty of free speech, on exemption from 
taxation unless self-imposed, on torture, on the rights of 
every citizen to act with freedom and independence, 
Coke’s law is the best law extant in the universe. Coke 
was implacable, Coke was relentless, because Coke was 
obstinate, because he was pertinacious, and could in 


SIR EDWARD COKE’S LAW. 


311 


nothing be made to swerve from his point. Therefore 
Coke having good cause, no doubt hated Bacon; no doubt 
for some such reason likewise hated Raleigh. 

Bacon was no less pertinacious and persistent, but his aims 
were private. His life had been devoted from his nineteenth 
year to one idea—place. Coke’s had been devoted to one 
end from boyhood—law. A second struggled for mastery, 
with it, love of money, but law triumphed. He was the 
soul of integrity, and honourable to the utmost scruple, as 
a judge. Coke was a man in whom principle, and what 
might be termed sentiments, predominated over intellect 
In Bacon intellect triumphed over principle. Herein was 
the main difference. Law with Coke was not an intellec¬ 
tual study, a philosophy, a system, but it was a means to 
an end. The welfare of the subject was its aim. Law 
was the embodiment of human justice, in power. 

The King was a very fine personage, and Prerogative, as 
a legal fiction, was even finer and grander ; but preroga¬ 
tive was not so grand as the law, because, as Bracton had 
said, the law made the King. The reasoning was sophistical, 
but what of that ? Coke never argued to convince—he was 
already convinced. His sentiments were noble ; his senti¬ 
ments had decided, and he brought a nobler array of argu¬ 
ment to justify his conclusion, to prove his case, than any 
man could before or since. If he had taken it into his 
head to defend torture, he would have defended it as ably. 
But this was not his nature: he elected against torture. 
The capacity that gives him obstinacy, gives him weapons 
to maintain it. He ransacks everything new and old that 
will make his point. He will never give way—no fear of 
that. While he breathes, where he has taken his stand 




312 


THE OUTBURST OF ENMITY. 


will he bide. On the 29th chapter of Magna Charta, the 
10th of Ed. III., and the phrase out of Bracton—on these 
he will take his stand ; so out of these he will furnish new 
weapons against tyranny, which shall he as a flaming sword 
in the hand of liberty for ever. Coke with obstinacy 
pursues everything, and with obstinacy he despises and 
also hates Bacon. 

The rivalry of these great men has been made much of 
by the moderns, but always with depreciation of Coke. 
Persons like Mr. Dixon, utterly ignorant of law, and still 
more incapable of appreciating the principles of law, sneer 
at him. With his usual temerity, Mr. Dixon heaps on 
one of the greatest benefactors of the human race, epithet 
on epithet; but Coke was, it must be understood, a man 
not less wonderful, not less supreme in genius, and in¬ 
finitely more noble in his aspirations, than Lord Bacon. 
To be sure he was no philosopher, but he was a lawyer. 
Law is a practical art. The welfare of the world as much 
depends on just law and just legislation, as on even 
sound philosophy. Liberty is as priceless as science. 
Coke’s practical art had a theoretical and ideal end. 
Bacon’s theoretical art had a practical and scientific end. 
Herein is another difference; for liberty and justice are 
abstractions, while the aim of Bacon’s philosophy was to 
produce practical fruit. 

Sir Edward had in 1598 put an open slight, indeed 
grossly, as his nature was, had insulted Bacon at the bar 
of the Exchequer. In 1605, Coke again insulted him, 
possibly with the same coarseness as before. Bacon wrote 
to expostulate with him* “ You take to yourself a liberty 
* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 102. 



BACON MADE SOLICITOE-GENERAL. 


313 


to disgrace and disable my law, experience, discretion, 
and what it pleases you I pray think of me. And surely 
I may not endure in public place to be wronged without 
repelling the same, to my best advantage, to right myself. 

.If you had not been shortsighted in your own 

fortune (as I think), you might have had more use of 
mebut that tide has passed. That I have written is 
to a good end, that is to the more decent carriage of 
my master’s service, and to our particular better under¬ 
standing. But it is hardly likely that a man so pre¬ 
judiced, so obstinate as Coke was, would be changed by 
these paper billets, nor was he. Coke, there can be 
little doubt, hated him to the end with a most unchristian 
hatred. 

At last, on the 25th of June, 1607, Bacon’s desires were 
crowned by the post of Solicitor-General. He had been 
twice passed over in 1604 and 1606, but his fortune is now 
mending. In 1608 his reversion in the Star Chamber 
falls in, and he has no longer to look on another’s ground 
which does not fill his own barn. 

In 1608 he submitted his ‘ Cogitata et Visa’ to Sir 
Thomas Bodley; and in 1609 he published ‘De Sapientia 
Veterum.’ 

In the parliament of sixteen hundred and six, Sir 
Francis Bacon distinguishes himself greatly, in furthering 
the King’s favourite scheme, of the union of Scotland and 
England, and his speeches at great length have been sup¬ 
plied from his works to the parliamentary history of the 
period. 

In 1611 he was appointed joint judge of the Knight 
Marshal’s Court. In 1612 Sir Robert Cecil, made Earl 

P 




314 


TESTS OF SINCERITY. 


of Salisbury in May, 1605,* died May 24, 1612. Within 
a week of his death, viz., on the 31st, he wrote of him to 
the King: “ Your Majesty hath lost a great subject and 
a great servant. But if 1 should praise him in propriety, 
I should say that he was a fit man to keep things from 
growing worse ; but no very fit man to reduce things to 
be much better, for he loved to have the eyes of all Israel 
a little too much on himself, and to have all business still 
under the hammer, and like clay in the hands of the 
potter, to mould it as he thought good, so that he was 
more in operatione than in opere” Poor petit Bossu! 
thou didst know thy grateful cousin Francis: thy father 
gauged him rightly: said he not truly, “ for thy cousin 
Francis he is shifty and a double dealer, trust him not? ,, 
Not a week dead, thou, whom while thou livedst he de¬ 
clared so wise. 

In contrast, here is a quotation from one of several 
letters of the same stamp to Salisbury himself:— 

“ Now it hath pleased you, by many great and effectual 
benefits, to add the comfort and assurance of your love 
and favour to that precedent disposition which was in me 
to admire your virtue and merit; I do esteem whatsoever 
I have or may have in this world but as trash in com¬ 
parison of having the honour and happiness to be a near 
and well-accepted kinsman to so rare and worthy a 
counsellor, governor, and patriot.”t 

But Francis Bacon is now writing to the King. He 
thinks it would be worth while for his Majesty to look 

* He was knighted 1591; made Baron Essendon, 1603; Viscount 
Cranborne August, 1604 ; Earl, May 4, 1605. 

f Montagu, vol. xii., p. 280. ‘ Resuscitation,’ Letter to Robert Cecil, 
Earl of Salisbury. 






AIMS AT THE SECRETARYSHIP OF STATE. 315 


about him ; there are, it is true, good men left, but 
do they know that to grant money to the King and to 
make the King popular, is their duty ? Perhaps not; 
but one Francis Bacon knows. Yes ; Francis Bacon “is 
a peremptory Royalist,” and “never one hour out of 
credit with the lower house.” Might he, his “ Majesty’s 
humble servant devote,” suggest some few things touch¬ 
ing future parliaments ? 

This letter produces no result: straightway another is 
sent. 

“ If your Majesty find any aptness in me, or if you 
find any scarcity in others, whereby you may think it fit 
for your service to remove me to business of state, 
although I have a fair way before me for profit, yet now 
that he is gone quo vivente virtutibus certissimum exitium. 
I will be ready as a chessman to be wherever your 
Majesty’s royal hand shall set me. I know not whether 
God, that hath touched my heart with the affection, may 
not touch your royal heart to discern it.”* 

A third letter is despatched, so indefatigable a beggar 
is the great philosopher. Of this the beginning is un¬ 
fortunately lacking : it now opens thus :—“ Lastly, I will 
make two prayers unto your Majesty, as I used to do to 
God Almighty, when I commend to him his own glory 
and cause; so I will pray to your Majesty for yourself.” 

This is certainly impious. The “ commend to heaven its 
own glory,” is something in the manner of some popular 
preachers we wot of. Infinite mercy, humanly speaking, 
is needed to forgive such hypocritic blasphemy; but let 
this pass. The remainder of the letter is to the purpose, 

* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 282. 

p 2 



316 


ABUSE OF THE DEAD. 


being devoted to abuse of his cousin, Robert Cecil, just 
deceased. It is too long to print, but is in effect this: 
That Cecil, who is gone now, had bated his Majesty’s 
prerogative in his attempt to raise money for his neces¬ 
sities. The royal wants and necessities have been 
mocked at by the Lords and Commons, talked of for 
months together: the King’s courses to obtain money, 
that should have been kept private, have been exposed in 
printed books, which were wont to be held secrets of the 
court (arcana imperii). Contracts have been made un- 
profitably; numerous projects have been stirred only to be 
blasted, leaving the monarch nothing but scandal. “ These 
courses, and others the like, I hope, are gone with the 
deviser of them, which had turned your Majesty to ines¬ 
timable prejudice,” finishing with the usual protestation that 
he is active in this, from “ love and affection ” to his master. 

If Cecil had been Bacon’s direst foe, with whom he 
was at open and acknowledged enmity, such abuse of the 
dead would have been unpardonable; but here every 
circumstance conspires to degrade the slander, and make 
the calumny infamous. Robert Cecil was his kinsman ; 
he was on terms of friendship with Francis Bacon. The 
latter had for years past knit his fortune to the secretary’s ; 
the enmity of early rivalry had ceased. He had openly 
praised Cecil; he always addressed him in terms of friend¬ 
ship and adulation.* He was seeking a place by dis¬ 
paraging the dead, that is, there was no possibility of its 

* These are some of them : “As a man by you advanced, I say in 
idem fer opem qui spem dedisti.” “ I do protest before God, without 
compliment or any light vanity of mind, that if I knew in what course 
of life to do you best service I would take it.” Mont., vol. xii., p. 123, 
* i I cannot forget your lordship, dum memor ipse mei.” 


MORE DOUBLE DEALING. 


317 


being done for any public end, it was simply with the 
basest motive. Being gratuitous and unnecessary, like the 
Essex prosecution, it was so much the more degrading. 

On Sept. 18th, 1612, he addressed another letter to 
James, suggesting how improvements might be made 
in the Court of Wards, having evidently an eye to his 
appointment to the mastership. In this letter he alludes 
to some notes he had given the King, doubtless to show 
his Majesty that he might make more profit from the post 
than at present, as James had declared them “ true 
passages of business.” As there was still a master of the 
post in existence, this letter indicates the attempt of a man 
to supplant another person by indirect and secret means. 
Neither of these letters produce a result. Bacon is not 
made secretary. He is not appointed to a place in the 
Court of Wards. He tries another shot therefore. His 
arrow has spent itself, or been consumed ; but his quiver 
is inexhaustible. 

He will now be more reasonable and treat for the 
Attorney’s place, so he writes another long letter, printed 
in the ‘ Cabala ’ and in 97 of Montagu, vol. v., begging 
the King to appoint him, or make him a promise of the 
Attorneyship. He knows the King’s vanity, and with his 
usual and wonderful cunning and knowledge of humanity, 
the particular return he offers to James is praise in 
history, “ to do some honour to you by my pen, either by 
writing some faithful narrative of your happy but not un¬ 
traduced times, or by recompiling your lawsand so, 
your Majesty, giving you the fame of another Justinian. 
James, on this, so well has Bacon calculated the fee, 
promises it. Soon after, Mr. Attorney Hobart fell 



318 


DISPARAGEMENT OF RIVALS. 


dangerously ill. While he is sick and confined to his 
bed, Bacon again promptly writes to remind the King 
most indecently of his promise. 

He does not wish the Attorney’s death, God forbid! he 
does not even wish to live “ more than to do your majesty 
service.” There have been an Attorney Coke and an 
Attorney Hobart: he counts Hobart already dead. I 
am alive myself, “ but if I should not find a middle way 
between their two dispositions and carriages, I should not 
satisfy myself.” * Again disparagement! 

The Attorney did not die, to Bacon’s sincere gratification 
no doubt; but about August 1613, Sir Thomas Fleming, 
the Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, did die. 
Bacon is again in the field, soliciting the place, if it 
pleased the King, over Hobart’s head. He thinks the 
Lord Chancellor’s place (not vacant) would be a good place 
for Sir Henry Hobart, nay, he would be almost loath to 
live to see this worthy counsellor fail in obtaining it. 
Noble, disinterested Sir Francis! so that I might have the 
place that is vacant, over Sir Henry’s head, the Chief 
Justiceship, that is the meaning of this modest proposal. 

But this is a letter demanding art; if the King should 
take it into his vain pate to exalt him, it would be a great 
point. So Bacon adds: “ My suit is principally that you 
then would remove Mr. Attorney to the place. If he refuse, 
I hope your Majesty will seek no further than myself.” 

The letter is not extant in which he proposed to Sir 
Henry Hobart to refuse, and try for the Chancellorship; 
perhaps it was never written, perhaps it was too dangerous 
a stroke of policy to put on paper : a hint or two would be 
* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 121, from ‘Resuscitation.’ 


THE COUP D’ETAT. 


319 


better. If he refuse! What! refuse a King ? who ever 
suspected Hobart would refuse, but Bacon ? but anyway^ 
James might be frightened into the idea, or familiarised 
with its possibility, and so not try him. The stroke is 
worth making ; if it fail there is no harm, but much good 
if it succeed. 

Sir Henry Hobart did refuse, an unusual thing, although 
he would have reduced his income by the change. Per¬ 
chance Bacon wrought upon him successfully, and showed 
him how something better might be done; the Chief 
Justiceship of the Common Pleas gained, to wit, an 
infinitely more profitable place than that. It is true, 
Coke is there; but if he could be removed, and so in¬ 
jured in that vital part of his person, his pocket! Ah! 
that would be a double stroke worthy Nick Machiavel 
himself. 

Singular to relate, Bacon’s coup d’etat, as these things 
are called now, succeeded. Hobart was appointed to 
the Pleas, Coke was, with a pretence of superior honour, 
elevated to the King’s Bench; Coke was injured in 
pocket, and made furious by his loss; Bacon was quietly 
appointed to the Attorneyship. 

We have seen above an allusion to a middle course 
between Coke and Hobart. Coke had already proved 
himself inflexible in the matter of law. While he had his 
career to make he was willing to be to some extent 
obsequious. He had not, like his rival, much personal 
self-respect. He stood little on his own dignity, hence 
his familiar converse with inferiors, for which Bacon 
afterwards rebuked him. To bend the knee was to him 
no such unspeakable degradation as to his rival, except 


320 


TAMPERING WITH JUSTICE. 


where a principle was concerned, for Bacon had much of 
what is termed pride, while Coke had little. So that 
Coke would have bent himself to the King’s ends, but to 
bend the law, ah! that was another thing. Yet that was 
precisely what his Majesty required. In this Coke was 
already found intractable. Hobart, on the other hand, 
was a mild, amiable, idle man, fond of ease and quiet. 
Bacon would be more industrious than the last, more 
servile than the first. With this view he submitted to his 
Majesty certain reasons, which were, no doubt, those that 
influenced Hobart, and which produced so happy and 
fruitful a consummation. Here are the reasons tendered, 
and which deserve to be recorded in full, as a masterpiece 
of the statesman’s art and craft. They are condensed, 
chiefly these. 

That it will strengthen the King's power among the 
judges, that is, enable him to overrule them, for it 
will place Coke near a privy councillor’s place, and so 
make him obsequious; and that the attorney-general being 
made a judge, will hold Coke to his duties, being a new 
man, and therefore emulous to please the King. That 
the Attorney-General is a timid man, and scrupulous both 
in parliament and other business; whereas the new 
solicitor (Mr. Francis Bacon) “ going more roundly to 
work, and being of a quicker and more earnest temper, 
and more effectual, in that in which he deals,” is like to 
recover that strength to the king’s prerogative which it 
hath had in times past, and which is due unto itand 
that a good man of courage and speech must be brought 
in, for it is not any use that the King’s judges are well 
disposed, except the King’s counsellors, his attorney and 







COERCING JUDGES. 


321 


solicitor, put the judges well to it; for in a weapon what 
is a back without an edge ? 

Now the plain English of this is—for Bacon never 
trusted his meaning to words which might betray him, 
—that if your Majesty mean to carry out this plan of royal 
prerogative asserted frequently, distinctly, and which you 
have so often conveyed to me, you must have unscrupulous 
servants, prompt, bold, dog-faced men;—men willing to 
face out public opinion, and to go before the judges and 
show them the way, so that they must follow. He next 
gives his reasons. 1st. That this will make the solicitor’s 
and attorney’s places valuable, and of consideration, and 
worth seeking, which will strengthen the King’s pre¬ 
rogative. 2nd. That to remove my Lord Coke to a 
place of less profit, though it be against his will, yet will 
be thought abroad a kind of discipline to him for opposing 
himself in the king’s causes; the example whereof will 
contain others in more awe. 

Lastly and chiefly, the belief has gained ground that by 
canvass, and labour, and money, places like the solicitors 
and judges are to be earned. (By merit for instance.) 
This should not be. This will appear to be the King’s own 
act, and to the Kng’s infinite honour, for people now say 
that the King can make good second judges ; but that is 
no mastery because men sue to be kept for these places. 

Again, we must help with a gloss, Sir Francis. He 
has grown so “ terribly wise ” in the precise value of 
phraseology in history, that he alone realizes absolutely 
the wisdom “ of their being intended to conceal thoughts 
for discipline, let punishment be understood. Discipline, 
it is true, looks better, but punishment is included. Dis- 

p 3 




322 BACONIAN PHRASEOLOGY. 

cipline is the right word, because it means the culprit is 
to be overawed in future, trained into obedience. But 
let the people know the King will not be trifled with, 
is the sense. Again, the King’s infinite honour includes 
really power. Infinite honour is a large phrase and com¬ 
prehends much besides being conveniently vague. It 
includes, of course, prerogative. If his Majesty is known 
to be in the habit of appointing the judges, at his own 
will and discretion, on their good behaviour, it will 
strengthen his power, pollute the fountains of justice, blast 
every honest avenue to ambition, and fame, and good 
repute. Seal up the mouth of truth, and cover the faces 
of the judges, so that the people shall be cursed. This 
is the English of it; but it is hardly to be expected Sir 
Francis should write in such coarse and uncourtierlike 
phrases, though he mean it. 

James had already declared his interest in the matter 
of the prerogative, that is, once for all, in the matter of 
his absolute and uncontrolled power or tyranny. He had 
said in his speech, “ Rex est lex loquens* in the matter of 
prerogative, as I would not lose any the honours and 
flowers of my crown, but rather my life. He is a 
traitrous subject that will saye a King may not proclaim 
and bind by it.”t 

And in 1614, in a speech which bears one or two marks 
of Bacon’s hands, the unfailing sign of his handiwork, 
speaking of his prerogative, James says : “ And where any 
controversies may arise, my lords the judges chosen betwixt 
me and the people shall decide and rule me.”J This 

♦ ‘Pari. Hist.,’ vol. i., p. 1099. f Ibid., vol. i., p. 1156. 

I Ibid., vol. i„ p. 1156. 






REASON'S FOR METAPHOR. 


323 


will show the importance of the honesty of the judges in a 
constitutional sense no less than as dispensers of justice. 
They were first to be packed and then called in as 
arbitrators by James, between himself and the people. 
Bacon was made attorney-general October 27th, 1613. 
Now, indeed, he hath builded himself up. Henceforth we 
have to contemplate Bacon’s career in a national and 
historical aspect. He is the King’s adviser. He helps 
his master with his speeches of state. One can pick out 
Bacon’s metaphors from James’s orations like currants from 
a pudding. James is fond of images. They have a com¬ 
mon liking and sympathy for conceits, and for fantastical 
images from the mythology. They both like little scraps of 
Latin; whereas Coke delighteth in a jargon of English 
and law Latin. The King and Bacon pepper in quotations 
from the classics, the one to show his attainments, the other 
to hide his intention. His Majesty indulges frequently in 
profane images, so, ever since he came to the throne, 
does Bacon. After the Gunpowder Plot, James likens 
his escape to the regeneration of man; and whereas God, 
in his mind, appeared greater in regeneration of man than 
in his creation, so, in saving him, James, he appeared 
greater than in his creation. (In mercy certainly, if 
history is to be trusted.) But Bacon’s images, Bacon’s 
profanity, Bacon’s law, Bacon’s quotations, Bacon’s meta¬ 
phors, Bacon’s conceits, can all be easily separated from 
royalty’s as wheat from chaff. The King’s answer to the 
Petition of Grievances in 1610 was doubtless Bacon’s. It 
was undeniably a lawyer’s—it has many features of Bacon’s 
lineaments traceable in it. It looks too business-like and 
direct to be wholly his however; but the speeches of 1614 


324 


bacon’s moulding hand. 


were undoubtedly of Bacon’s handling. This passage is, 
or I am shrewdly mistaken, Bacon’s : “ The three ends 
which have made me call this parliament together are 
Bonse animse, bona corporis, and bona fortunse—religious 
safety and the assistance of my subjects, which are the true 
grounds of this and all well-intended parliaments. For 
religion, which the philosophy with the glimmering light 
of nature called bonae animae,” &c. 

Here the King chops off into his old drivel. Bacon is 
too wise to place words altogether in a mouth that he has 
measured and that will not fit. Much too wise to write 
speeches and so appear to direct, not to suggest an image, 
or a definition that the King can use and believe his own, 
and receive credit for, that is a subject’s (a subject with an 
affectionate and loving heart) duty, as well as his delight 

In truth, Cecil is dead. The Monarch has now no great 
adviser. Bacon from the first volunteered his services. 
He has written, putting the words into the mouth of the 
King. “ Bacon, your words require a place to speak 
them in.* He is but as a mirror, as he himself has often 
told me, (I used the image, I flatter myself, well in my 
last speech,) to my wisdom, ‘ a puir gude bodye,’ who 
loves me, a man of peace.” The King knows him to be 
the most dutiful of men, so perhaps reasons that he is one 
of the most innocent. An ill-used and suffering admirer 
and worshipper of himself. How must Bacon have felt 
the error! What contempt he in his own heart felt for 
James—what unutterable scorn for his stupid pedantry, 
no man can now know. It was never expressed. If it had 
been, there had been an end of court life. The King 







bacon’s constitutional law. 


325 


would have lost a servant, Truth would have gained a 
disciple. Honour rescued a great name from scorn. 

So Bacon at last, as the result of sheer audacity, is now 
placed legal adviser to the crown, and in this chapter, at 
least, we must trace his connection with the history of 
England of this day—with the great strife ’twixt the King 
and the Commons; with the fight for prerogative and for 
liberty, which shall be fought face to face at Naseby and 
Marston Moor. When for ever the new world shall be 
divided by unsurpassable barriers of principle and law 
from the old; when a principle grander than any con¬ 
tained in the 4 Novum ’ shall be asserted and substantiated 
—that the king is but the head of the commonwealth ; 
that he is part of it, subject to the same laws as the rest 
of the members ; that the people were not made for the 
King, but that the King is their servant, representative, 
and delegated ruler, a truth which had never yet been 
asserted on a field of battle, as a principle, though it had 
existed theoretically in schoolmen’s hooks, and been par¬ 
tially understood for some hundreds of years. 


326 


STRENGTH OF PARLIAMENTS. 




CHAPTER XVI. 

The hour of twelve has struck : it is by natural sequence 
the hours of eleven, ten, and nine have gone before. 
Nature maintains as a law the same consistency in all her 
phenomena. A nation rising in arms against its King is 
not a sudden thought, the work of an hour or a day. 
One blow may, in truth, be final— one drop in the cup may 
overflow it; but unless it had in part been filled, it would 
not overflow. In like manner, had James I. not 
paved the way, Charles would never have been executed, 
an undoubted martyr on the one hand, on the other, a 
just sacrifice for a nation’s wrongs. 

When James came to the throne, the parliament of 
England had in part regained its old power, which it had 
almost lost under Henry VII. and VIII. Its language 
to Queen Elizabeth in 1601, after Essex had been led to 
the scaffold, was more dutiful and affectionate than that 
to Richard II. But it was bold, emphatic, and decided. 
On that very question of monopoly they stood up for a 
form, for they were now wise enough to comprehend the 
weight of forms, when these forms are to become pre- 




THE RISING SUN. 


327 


cedent and make history, and perhaps beget myriads of 
descendants. Francis Bacon would then have pro¬ 
ceeded by petition. They would proceed by bill. He 
would make it a favour of the Queen to grant, they would 
have it acknowledged as a right. The Commons were 
not in a position to be trifled with. They gained their 
point and proved their right. This was the last parlia¬ 
ment Elizabeth called. The great heart—the noble 
Queen worthy this great and golden age—worthy to rule 
a nation whose citizens were Shakspere, and Spenser, and 
Bacon, and Essex, and Raleigh, and Ben Jonson, Wotton, 
and Sidney, and Burleigh, Hooker, and Southampton, 
whose visitors were Beza, Casaubon, Montaigne, Gondo- 
mar, had ceased to beat. Elizabeth was dead. Broken¬ 
hearted, wasted away in a grandly tragic manner becoming 
herself and her age—refusing sustenance—not in her bed, 
bold to the last; but as a Queen should die. A Queen 
who had seen the ‘ Golden Hind ’ go out and return, who 
had listened to Shakspere, who had spoken oft to Raleigh, 
who had triumphed, through Heaven, over the Armada, 
and who had seen faction and rebellion from without and 
within, the hatred of Papists, the enmity of Ireland, the 
wrath of Spain all ridden through—herself the Great 
Captain in that one ship amid the mighty ocean, the 
Sovereign Head of the Protestant cause. 

James succeeds. Men rush impatiently to greet him as 
the rising sun. He is the King of a larger realm, of a greater 
power than any of his predecessors. His prerogative, 
his Royal power, is all but absolute. Hume has shown 
us fully and completely, that in practice the Monarch was 
absolute. That great historian has indeed compared the 


328 


james’s will. 


sovereignty with that of Turkey, as being alike arbitrary 
and supreme. Practically this was true. Theoretically 
it was false. The people had rights, but they were 
in abeyance. The ruler’s vast and extra legal privi¬ 
leges had made them all but useless. And now the 
time has come when it shall be determined whether 
the King or the people, the power of an absolute ruler 
or the law, is supreme. The question is simply whether 
Kingly power is to be controlled, or is uncontrollable. 
A small matter enough as a thesis for a composition, but 
tremendous, indeed, when it shall be fought out in civil 
war—when the combatants shall argue, father against son, 
brother against brother, kinsman against his kind, in 
deadly fight, with hatred at their hearts and weapons 
of warfare in their hands. James makes his election 
promptly. If the people talk about their rights, they 
have none. The King has rights only, the will of the 
Ruler is the supreme Jaw. 

From his first parliament to his death this is James’s 
own language. At first he insists mildly, then more 
peremptorily. Under Bacon’s advice, he grows more 
resolute, determined, absolute. He will draw the strings 
tighter than any of his predecessors, not because he is 
tyrannically disposed personally — for probably he was 
as affable as any of his predecessors—but because he 
will do battle for a principle. Because he is a pure 
Ideologist—a man that will fight for a principle against 
reason. Because his intellect does not suffice to prove 
that his cause is wrong. He believes that Kings are 
God’s vicegerents. He will be like to God. Here are 
some of his words in the speech of 1610. “ The state of 




THE FAITHFUL .SERVANT. 


329 


monarchy is the supremest thing on earth, for Kings are 
not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s 
throne, but even by God himself they are called gods. . . 
Kings have like power with God : they make and unmake 
their subjects; they have power of raising and casting 
down(here it may be seen how Bacon’s shaft strikes 
home) “ of life and death; judges over all their subjects, 
and in all causes, and yet accountable to God alone. . . . 
That as to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so is 
it sedition in subjects to dispute what a King might do in 
the height of his power; but just Kings will ever be 
willing to declare what they will do if they will not incur 
the curse of God. I will not be content that my power 
be disputed upon; but I shall be ever willing to make the 
reason appear of all my doings, and rule my actions ac¬ 
cording to my laws.”* 

These were James’s own sentiments: it is not to be 
supposed that Bacon was so foolish as to furnish him with 
these. The King was bent on enforcing them. Just as 
Bacon would furnish his Master with praise for his vanity, 
with protestations of service to satisfy him; would fawn on 
him to flatter him; would write up his ancestor, Henry VII. 
from whom he pretended directly to claim, or falsify 
history for his sake; Bacon would furnish him with law 
to justify his pretensions. If his Monarch would slay or 
torture any unhappy subject—an innocent man, moreover— 
Bacon will find him law for it. Nay more, he will, if 
necessary, perpetrate a crime with his own hands, and 
vindicate it afterwards, as occasion arises. Wherever James 
will go Bacon will follow. It is the property of weak 
* Appendix to * Parliamentary History,’ vol. xxiii., p. 3. 


330 


THE LAW OF FREEDOM. 


minds to seek the shadow and reject the substance. 
James did not so much crave substance as the shadow, 
the semblance, the mere theory of royalty and prerogative. 
He longed for the idea. Had he been ten times more cruel, 
ten times more tyrannical, he might have gratified himself. 
Had he only pretended to be constitutional, had he fawned 
on the Commons, he might have been more substantially 
great. But he was bent on the letter, not on the spirit, 
and the Commons, who might have been wheedled or 
fooled out of the spirit of independence, were strict to the 
letter. This is the duty and the necessity of corporations- 
Statecraft says the policy of kings is to seem pliant and 
be strong; to appear to accede rather than do it; to seize 
with the velvet fingers and the iron hand. James reversed 
the rule. 

From time immemorial the monarchy of England 
theoretically, that is in law, had been limited. The 
coronation oath of James was substantially that ad¬ 
ministered to Edward the Confessor, to grant and keep, 
and by act confirm the laws and customs and franchises of 
Englishmen. Hooker said, 1. 1. c. 10: “ And men saw 
that to live by one man’s will became the cause of all 
men’s misery; this constrained them to come to laws 
wherein all men may see their duties and know the 
penalties of transgressing them. And though wise and 
good men are fit to make laws, yet laws take not their 
constraining power from those that make them, but from 
the power which gives them the strength of laws: and by 
natural law, the lawful power of making laws, whereto all 
societies are subject, belongs so properly to these entire 
societies, that for any prince or potentate, of what kind 



ITS PERVERSION. 


331 


soever, to exercise the same of himself, and not either by 
express commission from God, or authority derived from 
their consent upon whose persons they impose the laws, is 
no better than tyranny.” Bracton has said: “ Rex autem 
habet superiorem Deum scilicet. Item legem, per quam 
factus est. Rex: item curia suam et est, ubi dominatur 
lex non voluntas.” Fortescue : “A king of England 
cannot, at his pleasure, make any alterations in the laws 
of the land, for the nature of this Government is not only 
regal but political.”* 

“ A king of England does not bear such sway over his 
subjects as king merely, but in a mixt political capacity. 
He is obliged by his coronation oath to the observance of 
the laws.” 

This is the law of the realm. Bacon, a lawyer, will 
oppose the law; he will pervert it by his knowledge; he 
will prove whatever the King desires to be legal. Pro¬ 
clamations having the force of laws ; Benevolences; Mo¬ 
nopolies ; every abuse which time, or experience, or 
corruption has engendered, he will, if need be, substan¬ 
tiate. 

Precisely as Coke has resisted the illegal attempts of 
the monarch to override the law, Bacon has sustained 
them. They are the advocates of opposite interests, 
hardly less opposed than day and night. These eight 
years since Bacon has been augmenting daily in the 
King’s favour; has become his sole hope in all matters 
of prerogative. In “the great case of impositions,” in 
which the monarch has attempted to inflict an import 
duty of five per cent, on currants, without the consent of 
* Cap. 9. 


332 


THE KING’S FAVOURITE LAW. 


parliament, Bacon has been the learned, eloquent, and un¬ 
remitting defender of the infraction. The King gained his 
verdict through Bacon. The Commons, alarmed, debated 
on the innovation, but were cautioned that this was a 
subject out of their province. At this they have remon¬ 
strated. Another dutiful servant of regal power, Mr. 
John Cowel, a professor of civil law at Cambridge, has pub¬ 
lished in 1607, a book called ‘ The Interpreter,’ dedicated 
to the Archbishop of Canterbury, containing matter even 
more grievous to parliament. 

It has inculcated, say the Commons, three dangerous 
doctrines:— 

1. That the King was not bound by his coronation 
oath, having power to dissolve any law. 

2. That the will of the King was the law of his people, 
and that, therefore, the Monarch is not compelled to call 
a Parliament unless he choose. 

3. That it was a favour to admit the consent of the 
subject to his own taxation. 

This book and its doctrines have been eulogized by his 
Majesty in parliament. The Commons thereupon com¬ 
plained* to the Lords, that it contained matters of 
scandal and offence against parliament, and is otherwise 
of dangerous consequence and example “ in which opinion 
the Lords have since concurred.” The result has been a 
remonstrance to the King, who has issued a proclamation 
suppressing the book.f 

* Feb. 10. 

f Preface to Cowel’s Dictionary. The editor of the ‘ State Triala * 
seems to have been unaware that the book was prohibited (see 1124, 
vol. ix., ‘ State Trials ’). 



VILE ADULATION. 


333 


In all these measures the author of the 6 Novum Or- 
ganum,’ has lent his aid. His speeches in the Exchequer, 
albeit less incautious in expression than James's own 
utterances, are to the full as usurping. The King likens 
himself to God. Bacon was the first to suggest the 
image. Bacon's adulation of the monarch in the first 
parliament comes back reflected grotesquely in his master’s 
language in the third. In fact, the philosopher holds the 
torch for James. He furnishes him alike with language, 
with reasons, and with law. 

In April 1603-4, James’s first parliament, we find 
Bacon saying that the King’s voice was “ the voice of 
God in man; the good spirit of God in the mouth 
of man. I do not say the voice of God and not of 
aan. I am not one of Herod’s flatterers. A curse 

fell upon him that said it.”.How to report his 

Majesty’s speeches he knew not, the eloquence of a King 
was inimitable. This was only of a piece with all 
his written and spoken language to the King. In his 
heaviest labours, in the 4 De Augmentis,’ in his histories, 
in his dedications, he pursued the same strain, and has found 
his benefit in it. But the House of Commons has become 
alarmed so early as 1604 with the Monarch’s speeches 
and with his conduct towards them. In June of that year 
they address to him an apology, touching their privileges, 
in which they declare among other things—for it is a very 
lengthy document—1st. That the citizens of England 
have free choice of members of parliament; 2nd. Free¬ 
dom from arrest of members; 3rd. Future freedom of 
speech in parliament. They assert that all these have 
been aimed at. That the prerogatives of princes may 



334 


BOLD INFRACTIONS. 


easily and do daily grow. That the privileges of the 
subject are for the most part at an everlasting stand * 
And they make six protestations in favour of their liberties 
and privileges, which they desire to be recorded for the 
benefit of posterity :—1st. That our privileges and liber¬ 
ties are our right and due inheritance, no less than our 
very lands and goods; 2nd. That they cannot be denied 
or withheld without injury to the realm ; 3rd. That their 
request to enjoy them at the opening of parliament is 
a mere form and courtesy; 4th. That the Commons is 
a court of record, and so hath ever been; 5th. That 
there is no court in the realm to compete with it in 
dignity; 6th. That it is the proper judge of return for 
all writs concerning the election of members. 

This boldness is of course opposed by James. He 
will put it down. He has already interfered in various 
ways by threatening, and even indirectly expelling mem¬ 
bers for plain speaking; and now the conflict is to com¬ 
mence. The King and Bacon on the one hand, the 
people of England on the other. I say this advisedly, 
because, though Bacon is dethroned and pushed out by 
Villiers, the King’s language from 1610 to 1617 is more 
violent, and his courses more tyrannical than at any other 
period during his reign. Under Bacon’s guidance and 
by his aid he attempts the worst, the most execrable acts 
of despotism which disfigure the face of English history. 
The prosecution of Peacham ; the granting of monopolies ; 
the extortion of Benevolences; the coercion and punish¬ 
ment (discipline) of judges by Star-Chamber prosecutions ; 
being but part of the system of legal and constitutional 
* ‘ Parliamentary History,' 1034. f Ibid., 1033. 


AMBITION A BAD GUIDE. 


335 


infraction at which he aims. In all these for immediate 
personal ends, the great philosopher will prove himself 
an active and zealous agent. The King is ignorant and 
blind. His adviser knows and understands the peril of 
the cause, but with one end only in view, will hesitate 
at nothing short of perdition. Into what infamy unscru¬ 
pulous ambition leads, the next chapter will show. 


336 


peacham’s trial. 


CHAPTER XVII. 

We come first to the prosecution of Peacham. The right 
to a fair trial is undoubtedly one of the first necessities 
of a free people. That innocence should be guarded is 
one of the fundamental duties of all law. The case of 
Peacham stands out on this account as one of the most 
flagrant acts of injustice ever perpetrated. The whole 
history of England from end to end discloses nothing 
so bad. 

Here are the facts. James I. had conceived a dislike 
against one Peacham, an old clergyman, nearly seventy 
years of age, rector of Hinton St. George, Somersetshire. 
History does not show why the prejudice existed, or how 
it arose; it shows clearly that it did exist.* Perhaps 
Peacham had attacked the Scotch ; perhaps used slighting 
anguage of the King; perhaps spoken strongly for the 
Palsgrave; perhaps charged James with the death of 
his son ; but it is idle to speculate on any, or all, of these 
causes. His indictment proves a certain knowledge of the 
corrupt courses of the Court. A certain boldness of 
reproof in him. He believes himself a Nathan to rebuke 
the King. The language for which he was tried may 
* Carleton’s letters. 





THE TRAMMELS OF LAW. 


337 


have been his only offence. It matters little. The King 
will have him punished. But he has committed no crime 
—violated no law. 

The punishment of an innocent man, in a legal manner, is 
a difficult thing. With James’s views there should be no 
difficulty at all about it. A King ought to be obeyed, and 
if necessary, Peacham should be dragged out and burnt 
at his command, as the pickpocket was hung in 1603, or 
Bartholomew Legatt, and Edward Wightman were 
burned for Arianism in 1612. But a difficulty occurs: he 
must be clearly tried. The pickpocket was hung, being 
caught in the fact. The heretics were burned, according 
to law and royal prerogative, with the semblance and 
forms of justice ; but to punish a man for no offence 
whatever, is difficult, even for an unscrupulous monarch. 
He applies, of course, to Bacon. Bacon sees no diffi¬ 
culty, at least none that an affectionate, loving, and 
conscientious servant of Majesty will not encounter and 
overcome. He sets about his task. The new year of 
1614 and 15 is ushered in to this poor old priest with 
Bacon’s prosecution on behalf of the crown. We find 
reference first made to Peacham in a letter to Mr. 
Chamberlain, dated January 1614-15. On the 19th of 
January, we find by a memorandum in the hand of Win- 
wood, that he has been stretched. On the 21st, Bacon 
writes to the King communicating his result. That even 
with torture they cannot get the innocent man to convict 
himself in any way, or even make an admission, that by 
devilish cunning can be tortured into treason. On the 27th 
there is another and longer letter extant, showing how, to 
obtain a false verdict, the King’s Attorney has tampered 

Q 


2s£i S» 


—-»- 



338 SLANDER OF PEACHAM. 

with the Judges. All this month he is a candidate for the 
Chancellorship. He is suing for place. He is writing 
letters concerning the dying Chancellor’s health to the 
King. This he hopes will be his reward. He received 
1200?. blood-money for the death of Essex. The Chan¬ 
cellorship is to be the sequence of his torturing Peacham. 
At the same time, moreover, he is prosecuting Mr. Oliver 
St. John, at the instance of the King, for treason. 
Another case which will need investigation. 

Mr. Dixon, with his usual recklessness as to truth, 
disposes of Peacham’s case with happy flippancy. Two 
or three slanders, two or three inventions to blacken 
Peacham’s character, and the case is settled. 

This is what he has said :— 

“ Not much has been left to us by the writers about 
Edmund Peacham ; yet evidence remains in the books at 
Wells and in the records of her Majesty’s State Paper 
Office, to prove that he was one of the most despicable 
wretches who ever brought shame and trouble on the 
Church. It is there seen that he was a libeller. It is 
there seen that he was a liar. It is there seen that he 
was a marvel of turbulence and ingratitude; not alone 
a seditious subject, but a scandalous minister and a per¬ 
fidious friend. It is in evidence that he outraged his 
bishop by a scandalous personal libel; and that he did his 
worst to get the patron to whom he owed his living hung.” 

This is matter never before printed. It is undoubtedly 
original—that is its peculiar merit. It is Mr. Dixon’s 
happy invention, and doubtless, had any stronger aver¬ 
ment been wanting it would have been similarly pro¬ 
duced. It cannot be charged that it is pure inven- 



THE CRIME NEVER COMMITTED. 


339 


tion—that would be giving credit to the author of the 
slander for ability, as well as the disposition to malign; 
it is simply untrue and false as applied to Peacham. 
There is nothing “to prove that he was one of the 
most despicable wretches who ever brought shame and 
trouble on the Church.” Mr. Dixon is self-convicted of 
this untruth at the outset, for if he had been such a 
person, there would have been no need for Bacon to 
torture him, to prove him guilty. 

I have simply to ask, Can any species of condemna¬ 
tion be too strong to stigmatize any such wilful slanderer 
and fabricator of untruths about the dead ? 

Peacham was the rector of Hinton St. George in 
Somersetshire, in the diocese of Bath and Wells. His 
case, as it has descended to us in the Law Reports, is 
this:—His house was searched, and there, amid a mass 
of papers, is found a sermon, “ never preached nor intended 
to he preached .” This sermon or MS. contained expres¬ 
sions, as may be presumed from the interrogatories to 
w r hich he was exposed, bearing on the King’s acts, the 
sale of crown lands, the laxity and deceit of persons 
about the King, his public officers, &c., his gifts to his 
favourites. It further appears from these also, that poor 
old Peacham believed himself a second Nathan to re¬ 
buke James; that he thought the royal infirmities 
ought to be exposed ; that the King might be stricken 
dead in his sins like Ananias or Nabal; that to recover 
the crown lands to the people again would cost blood 
and bring men to say, “ This is the lawful heir of these 
lands, let us kill him.” The possibly half-fanatic, or per¬ 
haps equally sincere old gentleman, who has been unhappily 

Q 2 


THE CRUELTY OF FEAR. 





340 


doomed to spend his life in these desolate wilds, with no 
other intercourse than the bucolic mind, probably as igno¬ 
rant as most of the rural preachers of his day, even went 
further in his biblical warmth, and used in his writings 
some vague expressions such as that the King’s officers 
should be put to the edge of the sword; much the same, 
no doubt, as we hear ministers of the mildest manners 
breathe forth denunciations of flame and fury against 
sinners, when heated with enthusiasm, or unduly oppressed 
with the weight of their spiritual mission. 

These remarks, never uttered or published, be it under¬ 
stood, were the entire case against the prisoner ; if any¬ 
thing stronger had been known, it would have appeared. 
Now, had Peacham “ preached ” these words, he might 
have entitled himself to censure, perhaps to some trivial 
punishment; but they can hardly be brought within the 
meaning of the statute of treason—of compassing the 
King’s death. Not having been published, they of course 
had no significance whatever; for it must be obvious to 
any person that a man may write, what he neither intends 
nor dares to utter, what his reason and calmer judgment 
will prompt him to soften, or exclude. Possibly some 
actively officious and good-natured friend, had written to 
the King, alleging that Peacham had spoken irreverently 
of him, which was quite enough to raise the Sage’s ire, 
especially if it was supposed to hint danger. Cowardice 
is always cruel. Fear is the fiercest of all tyrannies. 
James feared everything but how to do wrong, and de¬ 
termined on the old man’s punishment. What he really 
had preached must have been so mild that they dared not 
use it against him. They searched his house, and there 




THE PRICE OF THE CHANCELLORSHIP. 


341 


they found the paper containing the irreverent sugges¬ 
tions already quoted. 

Can we suppose any infamy stronger than this—that an 
innocent man should be dragged to trial, not for some 
act which he had consummated, but for some act which 
he had never intended to consummate, and which, if 
actually put in force, would have been no crime against 
the statute? Could any nation be more deplorably 
situated, than one in which this was held to be law ? 
Every man would be at the mercy of an informer; for 
with the disposition to punish, the means would never 
be wanting. Fortunately, English society was not in 
such a disorganized state that this could pass as law. 
Edmund Peacham, if brought to trial, it was known, 
could not be convicted. No jury would lend itself to 
such an iniquity. The judges would never rule such a 
prosecution possible in law. The old man had com¬ 
mitted no crime with his maundering fribble-frabble. 
What was to be done ? Caution him, one would sup¬ 
pose. No ; the King was greatly incensed against him,* 
would have him hung or burnt, if possible. Bacon was 
trying for the Chancellorship; Bacon, of course, would get 
it done if he could. Two things were necessary; two 
acts of infamy preliminary to anything else. The first, 
that some evidence should be obtained that he had a 
treasonable intention, evidence of some overt act, by the 
Statute of Treason 25 Ed. III., as proof of his intention 
to compass the King’s death. In the arbitrary days of 
Henry VIII., one or two persons had been punished for 

* Chamberlain, Feb. 9, to Carleton: “ The King is extremely in¬ 
censed against him, and will have him prosecuted to the uttermost.” 


342 


TORTURE! 


offences which only came doubtfully under this statute. 
But a special act of parliament had been passed for the 
purpose—the 25 Henry VIII., cap. 12. By this Sir 
William Stanley, chamberlain to Henry VII., was punished 
for saying that he would take part with Perkin Warbeck 
against the King’s heir. But this was known at the time 
to be an arbitrary punishment and a forcing of the law, 
though a speech made dangerous, by the wealth and power 
of the person who spoke it. 

In spite of the Editor of the 4 Athenaeum,’ no evidence 
was brought forward to prove that Peacham was either a 
“seditious subject” or had in anywise manifested a treason¬ 
able intention. Had Mr. Dixon then lived, doubtless there 
would have been no difficulty in obtaining evidence. He 
would have found it then, as he has found it now. Lord 
Bacon, in all his zeal, could not. The point then was 
to torture the man that he might, under the anguish of 
the ordeal, criminate himself; it being a maxim long 
known and already in print, That men under torture 
frequently criminated themselves, though innocent.* So 
Peacham was racked. Here are Winwood’s own words : 
“ Upon these interrogatories Peacham this day was ex¬ 
amined before torture, in torture, between torture, and 
after torture; notwithstanding, nothing could be drawn 
from him ; he still persisting in his obstinate and insensible 
denials and former answers. Signed Ralph Winwood, 
Julius Caesar, Francis Bacon, Henry Montague, Gervase 

* Fortescue, see page 358. Burleigh had written: “ The rack was 
never used to wring out confessions at adventure upon uncertainties.” 
Somers’ Tracts, vol. i., p. 211. This was an apology, in a condition of 
great religious intolerance, about five years before the descent of the 
Armada. 




THE INFAMOUS RECORD. 


343 


Helwysse, R. Crewe, Henry Yelverton, Francis Cot- 
tington. January the 19th, 1614.” Two days after Bacon 
writes to the King, but nothing in his letter betrays the 
devilish work he has been personally engaged in. It is 
as mild and placid as ever. Bacon never betrays himself 
in his language; yet he indulges in regret at his act. 
This, of course, is a concession to his conscience. He 
has always a protestation and a virtuous sentiment at 
hand. 

“ It may please your excellent Majesty, 

“ It grieveth me exceedingly that your Majesty 
should be so much troubled with this matter of Peacham’s, 
whose raging devil seemeth to be turned into a dumb 
devil. But although we are driven to make our way 
through questions (which I wish were otherwise), yet I 
hope the end will be good ; but then every man must put 
to his helping hand, for else I must say to your Majesty, 
in this and the like cases, as St. Paul said to the cen¬ 
turion when some of the mariners had an eye to the 
cockboat, ‘ Except these stay in the ship, ye cannot be 
safe.’ I find in my lords great and worthy care of the 
business. And for my part, I hold my opinion, and am 
strengthened in it by some records that I have found. 
God preserve your Majesty ! 

“ Your Majesty’s most humble and devoted subject 
and servant.” 

The devil can quote Scripture to his purpose: “ Yet I 
hope the end will be good.” So some of the judges are for 
giving up this business; they will get into the cockboat, 
though there be a King to please. This will not do. The 
burthen of infamy must be shared, and shared to some 
extent it was. Bacon, however, was to reap the reward, 
was the prime mover and correspondent with the King, 


344 


DURING GOOD BEHAVIOUR. 


the putter on. And as he was to be benefited, so now 
must he reap the infamy. 

Bacon writes personally to the Bishop of Bath and 
Wells to see if anything could be obtained to criminate 
Peacham in that quarter. There is still no evidence, and 
everything is at a standstill. In the ordinary course of 
things, Peacham ought, being guilty of no offence, to be 
liberated. This is not the King’s wish. Will the judges 
be content with the evidence already existing ? that is the 
point. Will the judges suborn themselves, falsify their 
oaths, work injustice, pluck down truth and equity from 
where they should be most enthroned, confound right and 
wrong, and hang this man who has committed no crime, 
that Bacon may be made Lord Chancellor underhand ? 
That is the matter in issue. 

The judges at this time are appointed during the King’s 
pleasure. “ Durante bene placito ” run the words. Little 
do “ gentlemen who live at home at ease ” know of the 
magic lying in the words, “ Bene se gesserint.” Little do 
they know how much liberty, truth, and justice lie in the 
difference between a judge appointed during the King’s 
pleasure and one appointed during good behaviour, only 
removable by Parliament and by open trial. But this was 
not all. The Star Chamber Court existed, and into this 
court a judge could be called, and there, without trial, 
rebuked, dismissed his office, fined to the extent of all his 
worldly goods and chattels, and sent to the Tower. In 
other words ruined, not merely in his person and estate, 
but in his family and hopes of inheritance. 

With this tremendous power in his hands, the minister 
of the King, Bacon, will work on the Judges with threats 




CEAFTY ADVICE. 


345 


of the Star Chamber, with hopes of promotion, with 
eloquent pictures of the horrors of imprisonment, of the 
degradation of loss of office, of the infamy of attaint in 
blood, of a ruined family, and a blackened fame. Elo¬ 
quence rare as his, gifts of reason, persuasiveness of 
manner, blandness of expression are to be lavished on this 
end. If need be, the rod will not merely be threatened, 
but applied. A letter of Jan. 27th explains in part, 
darkly as ever, but still sufficiently for us, his purpose. 
The judges have been felt. Coke was disinclined alto¬ 
gether. He objects to this mode of taking opinions. 
Auricular, the stanch old gentleman in his uncouth phraseo¬ 
logy calls it—auricular being law English with Coke 
for “ earwigging.” Serjeant Montague has been set 
upon Justice Crooke, Mr. Serjeant Crew upon Justice 
Houghton, and Mr. Solicitor, Bacon’s creature, with Justice 
Doddridge. This done, Bacon will speak then with Coke, 
or else if he speaks with Coke first, Coke will at once speak 
to the judges, and so mar the project. These three, 
Montague, Crew, and Mr. Solicitor were ordered to 
speak resolutely, as if they were certain of the law and 
the matter were determined. This plot answered ; Jus¬ 
tice Doddridge was found very ready to give his opinion 
in secret; that is, he was willing to lend himself to the in¬ 
famy if it were not done openly. So was Crooke. Houghton, 
“ who is a soft man,” was anxious first to confer, alleging 
that he was not acquainted with business of this nature. 
A wily adviser is Sir Francis Bacon ! 

He then proposes to the King that they shall then be 
made acquainted with the papers. “ And if it were done 
as suddenly as this was, I should make small doubt of 

Q 3 



346 


TO WORK ON COKE. 


their opinions”—that it must be done right off, before they 
have time to think. This is rather villainous and devilish; 
but here is a sentiment to cover it: “ And howsoever, I 
hope, force of law and precedent will bind them to the 
truth; neither am I wholly out of hope that my Lord Coke 
himself, when I have in some dark manner put him in 
doubt, that he shall be left alone will not continue singular.’ 

Lest any one should call this crime, Bacon calls it “ truth.” 
Coke “in some dark manner”—truly a dark deed— 
is to be threatened with being left alone, a threat, to my 
Lord Chief Justice, a wealthy man, loving his money¬ 
bags, with a Star Chamber fine before his eyes, of some 
importance, and likely to work, to say nothing of loss of 
the King’s favour and hindrance of promotion at court. 

The end of this letter, a long one, is, if possible, more 
infamous than its beginning. It alludes to another victim 
Bacon has in hand as well as Oliver St. John, one John 
Owen ; but it passes on to the fact that he, Bacon, has 
heard of more ways than one, of 20,000?. yearly having 
been offered, for farming the penalties of recusants, in 
other words, for the fines, to which poor wretches like these 
are subjected in the holy names of religion, and public policy. 
Bacon thinks the offer a good one, “ if it can pass the 
fiery trial of religion and honour.” Of course no one 
could expect Sir Francis to wish otherwise. 

On the 31st, he writes again to the King on Peacham’s 
business, another and a longer letter. He has seen Coke 
twice and delivered him Peacham’s papers, and urged on 
him the precedents which he, Bacon, had carefully col¬ 
lected. Coke had objected that judges were not expected 
to give their opinions in this manner; that it was a new 





HONESTY AND CRAFT. 


347 


thing in law, and dangerous; with “ other words more 
vehement than I repeat.” 

“ I replied in civil and plain terms, that I wished his 
lordship in my love to him, to think better of it, for that 
this was no such serious matter as his lordship would 
assume, but perfectly plain and fair; that it was no 
violation of their oath, but gave the King the opportunity 
of consulting with the judges, which of right belonged to 
them. Nay more, to deny the King counsel in this matter 
would be to violate their oath, which was to counsel the 
King without distinction whether jointly or severally. 
Whereupon I asked if it were in a matter of state at the 
privy council, would he similarly deny the King his audi¬ 
ence? To this he answered, the cases were not alike, 
because this concerned life. To which I answered, that 
questions of estate might concern thousands of lives, and 
there were many things more important than the life of a 
man, as war and peace,” &c. 

Coke desiring to get rid of this wily and insidious 
counsellor, this serpent-like eloquence, desired Bacon to 
leave the papers with him for the present. “ I said I 
would, because I thought his lordship, upon due consi¬ 
deration of the papers, would find the case to be so clear 
a case of treason, as he would make no difficulty to 
deliver his opinion in private, and so I was persuaded of 
the rest of the judges of the King’s Bench who likewise 
(as I partly understood) made no scruple to deliver their 
opinion in private.” Bacon was ready, as we see, with a 
lie at need. The judges had, as it is proved, all made 
scruple to deliver their opinion. One absolutely. But his 
wariness is seen in the parenthesis. He will tell the lie to 


348 


THE LAW OF PEACHAM'S CASE. 


Coke, because that is not written. He will not write it 
to James, because James knows better, and it would be in 
evidence, so be qualifies it with “ (as I partly understood).” 
“ Whereupon he said (which I noted well) that his brethren 
were wise men, and that they might make a show as if 
they would give an opinion as was required, but the end 
would be that it would come to this, they would say 
they doubted of it and so pray advice with the rest. 
To this I answered that I was sorry to hear him say so 
much, lest it might come to pass that some, that loved him 
not, might say, that, that which he had foretold, he had 
wrought.” Bacon sends this paragraph with an inductive 
compliment to himself, and surely it is deserved, for 
subtlety was never carried further. If Coke does not 
lead the judges, he may be accused to the King that he 
had caused the judges to oppose him, to justify his own 
prophecy. Is not this a masterstroke of policy ? 

This is the end of his first meeting with Coke. 

But he has met him a second time, and this second 
meeting is even of more importance. Bacon arms himself 
with all the precedents. They are unluckily obliged 
to proceed on the statute 25 Ed. Ill: “ the imagining and 
compassing the death and final destruction of our lord 
the King,” but “ to lock him in as much as I could, 
(I proposed) that there he four manners whereby the 
death of the king is compassed and imagined. 

“1. By plot. 

“ 2. By disabling his title. 

“ 3. By subjecting his title to the pope. 

“ 4. By disabling his regiment (his regime) and making 
him appear incapable or indign to reign. 




QUALIFICATIONS FOR PLACE. 


349 


“ These I insisted on with more efficacy and edge, au¬ 
thority of law and record, than I can now express.” 

Coke is not to be entrapped into this crime. His 
honesty is neither to be cheated, nor his intellect be¬ 
guiled. He listens, takes notes, questions Bacon’s inter¬ 
pretation of the law, and in answer to the insinuation 
that the King w T ould think him backward if he did not 
give his opinion promptly, answered, that when the other 
judges had given their opinion he would be ready with 
his. 

The letter concludes by pointing out another mode of 
raising money, as a qualification for the Chancellorship. 
The previous letter suggested one scheme, by confiscation. 
James is very poor, always in debt, will indeed do any¬ 
thing for money, so desperate is his need. There is now 
another plan which cannot fail to make so useful a servant 
profitable to the King. Some one has obtained a grant of 
a forest worth 30,000/. for 400/. under colour of a de¬ 
fective title. This is no other than Lady Shrewsbury, 
whose husband Gilbert has been brought before the 
Privy Council two years before, with a view to deprive 
him of his dignity in Ireland—a lady who might be 
fined in the Star Chamber for instance, to the tune of 
perhaps 50,000/. But Bacon has gained this knowledge 
extrajudicially, perhaps from the Lord Treasurer; and 
though he is willing to seem active by thus divulging a 
secret, would not wish it known, so he asks James to keep 
the knowledge from that nobleman. 


~ .. 


350 TORTURE INEFFECTUAL. 


CHAPTER XVIII. 

James recommended that in Owen’s case “the same 
course of private coercion of the Judges” should be fol¬ 
lowed ; for it was not clear whether Owen could be 
dragged within the law, and so murdered with a show 
of justice or not. Bacon thinks (letter of February 11th) 
it is not necessary ; that there is “ sufficient evidence ” 
in his case, clearly proving that he was aware that in 
Peacham’s case there was not, and that it was murder he 
was contemplating, not punishment. He has by this time 
taken Coke apart again, and asked him for his opinion 
“ after the rest were gone,” when “ I told him all the rest 
were ready.” Another untruth. Coke would give no an¬ 
swer. Then Bacon concludes: “ I have tossed this business 
in omnes partes .” On the 14th February Coke has given 
in, in his own handwriting, his opinions, which Bacon in¬ 
closes to the king with the comments “ Oportuit Jicec 
fieri” and “ Finis autem nondum” On the 28th Fe¬ 
bruary he announces that although the Bishop of Bath and 
Wells has been doing his best to intimidate Peacham, he 
has not been successful in wringing from the poor grey¬ 
headed old man, broken by his recent tortures, anything 



A FALSE PASSAGE. 


351 


either to criminate himself or others, 6C neither doth 
Peacham alter in his tale touching Sir John Sydenham.” 

By way of illustrating how unlucky Mr. Dixon’s inven¬ 
tion is, and that his fabrications do not unfortunately, or 
by good luck tally with history, here is his version. 

“ How Peacham lies and swears, now accusing others, 
and now himself, anon retracting all that he has said, 
denying even his handwriting and his signature, one day 
standing to the charge against Sydenham, next day 
running from it altogether; how he is sent down into 
Somersetshire, the scene of his ignoble ministry, to be 
tried by a jury of men, who will interpret his public 
conduct by what they know of his private life; how he is 
found guilty by the twelve jurors and condemned by Sir 
Lawrence Tanfield and Sir Henry Montagu, two of the 
most able and humane jurors on the bench ; how his 
sentence is commuted by the crown into imprisonment 
during the King’s pleasure, and how he ultimately dies 
in Taunton jail, unpitied by a single friend, I need not 
pause to tell.” 

A witty modern writer in going through Covent Garden 
Market heard a man, vending asparagus, point it out to the 
notice of the crowd with the recommendation, “ That them 
ere is a hexcellent grass.” It struck him that the sentence 
was unmatchable, in pronunciation and grammatical con¬ 
struction, as an example of incorrect English. Perhaps it 
is. Similarly I will aver that a statement containing more 
wilful misstatements and more ignorant misstatements, 
cannot be produced in literature. In the first five lines 
there are no less than nine deliberate inaccuracies. The 
truth of the rest of the sentence I will presently test. 


352 


THE INFORMERS’ TESTIMONY. 


But we have it in Bacon’s own hand repeatedly, that it 
was impossible to make the man contradict himself. 

On the 9th or 10th of March Peacham is again racked, 
stretched, as Chamberlain pleasantly calls it. In all the 
agony of torture he does not swerve from the main facts ; 
he denies, however, that the writing was his—whether 
with truth or without, cannot, alas! now be known. 
Perhaps the sermon was not in his own hand—had been 
merely foisted into his study by a spy and an informer. 
One of the witnesses, perhaps the only witness, against 
him, is examined again on the 10th. He states that what 
he has already declared about Peacham before the Lords 
of the Privy Council, before my Lord of Canterbury, 
“ was wholly out of fear, and to avoid torture.” 

This man knows so little of the unhappy victim of his 
accusation as to be able to affirm only that he was tall of 
stature, and “ can make no other description of him,” 
and finally denieth to set his hand to this examination. 
So, although Bacon with his tools, Crew and Yelverton, 
have found an informer to their purpose, they cannot get 
him to effect what they want. 

In King James’s own hand there is a statement of 
Peacham’s case. From this it appears that the sermon 
containing the alleged treasonable passages was found 
with a mass of other papers in a box without a lid ; that, 
though Peacham confessed he might preach it in the end, 
yet it would only be after “ all the bitterness had been 
taken out.” 

All Bacon’s efforts so far have been of no avail. 
To frighten the old man, perhaps actually to torture 
him, what Bacon calls a false fire has been made in 





DEEPEK INFAMY. 


353 


the Tower, “as if he were on the point of being carried 
down ” to it. Whether a large fire, as if he were to be 
immolated, so as to extort a dying confession, or whether 
it was merely some new torture which was really applied, 
cannot now be known. And the rumour i§ getting abroad 
—for men cannot keep counsel—that the old man is 
being murdered, that he did not commit treason, that 
the case is not treason; therefore Bacon would have it 
given out constantly, and “ yet as it were a secret,” that 
there is no doubt about the offence, and that whereas 
the doubt is that “ first, there is no treason in the words; 
second, that he perhaps never wrote them : that it is 
a question of the publication that is the difficulty.” In 
the letter in which this sentence is contained, Francis 
Bacon confesses that he is at last at his wits’ end with 
respect to the man. He can go no further in it, having 
exhausted every means; notwithstanding he has turned 
it over in every way, being unwavering in zeal. 

The letter again concludes with a suggestion of pe¬ 
cuniary relief, at the expense this time of a Mr. Murray, 
apparently by defrauding Mr. Murray out of his just 
right to the Northumberland estates, as coheir of Thomas 
Earl of Northumberland. 

“ Mr. Murray is my dear friend ; but I must cut even in 
these things, and so I know he would himself wish no other.” 

Alas! what a rare and noble public spirit; how un¬ 
lucky that it should clash with private friendship! So 
pious, patriotic, and holy a devotion, it is indeed a cruel 
fate which subjects it, to such sacrifices ! 

Bacon has exhausted his means. Coke and the judges 
have resisted, and resisted triumphantly. Peacham can- 


354 


A CHARITABLE ASSUMPTION. 


not be tortured into confessing a treason he never com¬ 
mitted. Only one course remains to “ make away ” with 
the man, which were perilous, as rumours are abroad, or 
to acquit him. Yes, there is an outlet, a third plan ; 
to send him down to Taunton, Bacon’s old borough, 
where he has some influence yet, and there, by means 
of a packed jury, to get their victim convicted. This 
iniquity was perpetrated. He was there tried by the ser¬ 
vile Tanfield and Montagu. The tools, Crew and Yelver- 
ton were his accusers. Against the law, against the facts, 
by seven knights of the shire being put on the jury for the 
purpose—Bacon himself superintending and directing the 
packing—the old man was found guilty. He, the poor old 
wretch, his spirit undaunted, one of God’s chosen servants 
to uphold the truth, his limbs dislocated, his little span of 
life made a labour and heaviness, is there, within three or 
four months after his torture, cast into jail. The govern¬ 
ment is afraid even then to hang him. He is left to rot 
in his cell, and in the following year death grants him 
that mercy which was denied him here on earth, a 
release from his persecutions and sufferings. 

Mr. Dixon says, unpitied by a single friend. How, in 
the sacred names of justice and of truth, does he know 
this ? Wherein can any benefit accrue to the memory of 
Bacon from such gratuitous and unfounded aspersions 
that can be so easily dissipated ? 

I can add nothing to the enormity of the naked facts of 
this illegal trial, having no desire to strengthen the issue. 
But have simply followed such narratives as exist in 
authenticated and undeniable proof. I have suggested 
nothing. I may have weakened my case by want of skill, 



FOLLY AND FLIPPANCY. 


355 


but surely nothing can be more terrible than its cruelty— 
nothing more terrible than its naked barbarity. But as 
a precedent, as an example, how much more weighty, how 
much mor6 dreadful does it become ! 

Let us for one instant.pause to consider the enormity of 
tampering with the judges. Apart from the cruelty of 
the act of torture; apart from the unjust verdict; apart 
from the prolonged cruelty of his imprisonment; apart 
from the final murder of an innocent man; let us for one 
moment think of the horrors which must ensue from such 
a mode of defeating justice. “Wo unto you, for I have 
covered the faces of the judges,” is the awful curse. 
It is to stop justice at the fountain-head; it is to overturn 
every man’s liberty, every man’s safety. It is to render 
every subject subservient to the King, to the utter perver¬ 
sion of truth and right. And all this tremendous ma¬ 
chinery was put in force to secure the conviction of one 
feeble old man, who in the course of nature had but a few 
years to live. To secure one man’s conviction, and Lord 
Bacon the Chancellorship. 

Mr. Dixon’s remarks on this case display his usual 
folly, his usual flippancy. He in his ignorance really 
confounds, or in his duplicity pretends to confound, this 
case of tampering with the judges, with a “consultation ” 
with the judges. If Mr. Dixon had ever been grounded, 
ever so little, in law, in the merest rudiments, he would 
have read, in the Reports and in the State Trials, and 
therefore have known wherein the difference consisted. If 
he had ever looked into the Institutes he would have seen 
there the distinction drawn. He would not then have 
attacked Lord Campbell; he would not have been under 


356 


FALSE WITNESS. 


the necessity of attributing to Lord Campbell words which 
he had never written. He would, it is true, have lost an 
opportunity of proving himself wiser than Macaulay; but 
perhaps even such an opportunity is no benefit. Here is 
Mr. Dixon’s comment:— 

“ In the wake of Macaulay, Lord Campbell says, that a 
private consultation with the judges was an act most scan¬ 
dalous and most unusual.” 

Lord Campbell has not said any such thing. This 
is probably another instance of imaginative suggestion. 
What Lord Campbell said was this: “ He, Bacon, there¬ 
fore first began by tampering with the judges, to fix them 
by an extra-judicial opinion,” a very different matter, as 
his censor could hardly have failed to perceive. 

Although all writers on legal and constitutional history 
have declared the case singular and unprecedented, Lord 
Campbell’s critic says: “ The scandal may be matter of 
doubt, their frequency is beyond denial.” He then 
proceeds, in his peculiar cockney English, Dixon English, 
to talk about “ the statutory bearing ” of political crimes. 
What the statutory bearing of a crime is, it would be 
hard to say ; but this is certain, whatever it is, the judges 
never before were tampered with, to the same extent or in 
the same manner, as Mr. Dixon would have known, had 
he mastered the elements of legal reading. In the State 
Trials he would find an allusion to the only approach to 
such a thing. He would know that the precedent there 
referred to was made, but with no such pertinacity, or 
art, or deliberation, by Henry YU., that it was met and 
foiled by Justice Hussey. 

Not content with thus showing his ignorance, Mr. 




WISER THAN MACAULAY. 


357 


Dixon, to fortify himself, suggests that Macaulay is as 
ignorant as Lord Campbell—that that eminent historian 
has said “ there is no instance of the crown privately con¬ 
sulting with the bench.” I can find no such passage in 
Macaulay, and challenge Mr. Dixon to substantiate his 
statement. Macaulay says: “ He was guilty of attempting 
to introduce into the courts of law an odious abuse, for 
which no precedent could be found.” An undeniably 
accurate statement. On this the critical Editor observes : 
“Why, the law books teem with precedents. One will 
serve for a score. It happens, indeed, that there is one 
precedent, so strange in its circumstances, and so often 
the subject of legal and historical comment, that it is 
amazing how it could have slipped the recollection of any 
lawyer, and most of all a lawyer writing of the times of 
James I.” Wise Mr. Dixon! wonderful in knowledge, so 
profoundly superior to Macaulay ! The learned Editor of 
the ‘ Athenaeum ’ then proceeds to cite the case of Legate, 
burned for heresy, and, pleased with his wondrous dis¬ 
crimination, adds in a sentence emphasized by being 
printed in a line by itself— 

“ This is the precedent Macaulay seeks.” 

There is no proof that the judges were tampered with 
in Legate’s case; they were consulted with, of course, 
because the law was very nice on the point. Statutes for 
burning heretics had been made and repealed, and the 
power of the King to burn his subjects for religion’s sake, 
was somewhat in doubt. 

The monarch retained a prerogative right to issue a 
writ, De comburendo : the point was whether Legate could 
be burned by the statute, or only by the common law* 


358 


THE LAW AGAINST TORTURE. 


The 1st of Elizabeth had not repealed the power. Coke 
was applied to. He held that the writ would not lie; 
Tanfield, Fleming, and Williams certified that it would. 
To ask a judge what law is, and under what head 
an offence clearly proven may fall, is one thing. To 
ask a judge to convict an offender, guilty of no crime, is 
another. 

As a further instance of Mr. Dixon's ignorance, he 
seems to consider that Bacon was only following a usual 
custom in applying the torture to Peacham. The 
iniquity of the act was unhappily increased by the circum¬ 
stance that Bacon revived what he knew was an illegal 
act, and contrary to the spirit of the English law. Here 
was the law, as expressed by its greatest authorities: “ Now 
what man is there so stout or resolute, who has once gone 
through this horrid trial by torture, be he never so inno¬ 
cent, who will not rather confess himself guilty of all 
kinds of wickedness, than undergo the like tortures a 
second time ?”* 

Lord Burleigh, Sir Thomas Smith, Coke, had all de¬ 
clared its impolicy and folly or illegality. One writer 
had said, that all tortures and torments of parties accused 
were directly against the common laws of England ;t and 
again, to prove that this illegal act was legal, this 
inhuman and unpolitic barbarity was not exceptional, 
Lord Macaulay’s censor indulges in another highly pic¬ 
turesque and exquisitely finished rhetorical declaration, 
to the effect that it was customary for cardinals to search 

* Lord Chief Justice Fortescue, ‘De Laudibus Legum Anglise,’ 
cap. 22, temp. Henry YI. 

f Coke, 3rd Institute, cap. 29. 



THE TORTURE OF GUY FAUX. 


359 


“ out heresy in the flames of the Quemadero, as the Council 
of Ten tracked treason in the waves of the Lagune.” 
These handsome generalities in such fine language, which 
mean nothing, are no answer to the fact that Bacon, in 
defiance of law , used torture at a time when the feelings 
of men were opposed to its employment.* That the 
heinousness arose from the peculiar fact that the man 
racked was an innocent man. The flames of the Quema¬ 
dero or the waves of the Lagune are no answer to this. 
Faux was racked, but there was no doubt he had intended 
the perpetration of a great crime, for he was caught in the 
act, and all laws have allowed more prompt retaliation to 
crimes detected under such circumstances. But even 
Faux’s punishment was illegal; it was one of James’s 
own tyrannies. Like all the Stuarts, he had an unhappy 
predilection for cruel and sanguinary punishments; 
Charles I., Charles II., James II., were all inclined to the 
mutilation of their subjects. Ear-cropping, nose-slitting, 
branding, were never so rife as during the Stuart dynasty. 
He was present at Faux’s own racking. He was cognizant 
of Peacham being tortured. Like many cowards, he was 
fond of inflicting pain. But the crime in Bacon was, that 
being law adviser to the crown, knowing well the moral 
enormity of the act—for he himself pretends to have 
saved a man from racking in Elizabeth’s day—he should 
actually break the law, to commit so flagrant a cruelty for 
his own personal ends. 

Mr. Montagu adopted the lenient view that cruelty was 
general in Bacon’s day, and that he was no worse than the 
majority of men. No doubt the tender feelings of to-day are 
* On Torture, vide Appendix. 


360 


ADMIRABLE LOGIC. 


inclined to judge harshly the acts of that. There was a 
barbarism in the sports of the populace, not now permitted 
by law. But among educated men cruelty was then held 
in as great abhorrence as now.* As usual, the author of 
‘ The Personal History of Lord Bacon,’ is prepared with his 
characteristic logical acumen to prove that torture was a 
matter of course—in proof, “ that the ballads sung in the 
street were steeped in blood; that Hamlet, Pericles, and 
Titus Andronicus were the Shaksperian favourites.” It 
is not obvious that ballads steeped in blood bear specifi¬ 
cally on the legal existence of torture; but it is a fact 
that the ballads of Elizabeth’s day were not more san¬ 
guinary than those of to-day. To argue from the fact 
that ‘ Hamlet ’ being a favourite play, the rack was a 
legal instrument, is a species of philosophic deduction, to 
which the feat of ingeniously deriving pickled cucumbers 
from King Jeremiah is a mere commonplace. 

Pericles was no such favourite as Macbeth or Othello. 
The age was coarse. Religious intolerance was strong. 
Punishments were usually severe. The form of law was 
neither so exact, nor so well framed for the protection of the 
subject as to-day. But undeniably Bacon was guilty of an 
exceptional act of cruelty, all the more disgraceful that he 
was a man who must have been eminently cognizant of its 
turpitude. Being in defiance of that Law, that he as a 
lawyer was bound to uphold, and perpetrated on a man 
whom he knew to be innocent, it was simply execrable. 

* On this point see Ascliam’s ‘ Schoolmaster,’ and the opinion therein 
expressed, on the treatment and discipline of children, by several states¬ 
men of the time, circa 1550. It will be seen that educated men were 
as averse to cruelty then, as now. 




NECESSITY THE MOTHER OF VILE INVENTIONS. 361 


CHAPTER XIX. 

We have seen already that the reign of James opened a 
struggle on the side of the people for liberty, on the side 
of the monarch for prerogative. Singularly, there was no 
form of that prerogative more particularly odious than 
another on which James did not, either from necessity or 
inclination, insist. His continual gifts to his needy fa¬ 
vourite and his thriftlessness kept him poor. This neces¬ 
sitated a recurrence to indirect means of obtaining money. 
The parliament limited his allowance. He always ex¬ 
ceeded it. He was consequently in the position of any 
other spendthrift, of being compelled to borrow. This 
resource failed, and it was then left for James to do, 
what a private individual could not do—extort money 
from his subjects by illegal means. By inclination he was 
a great stickler for the letter of Prerogative. By pecuniary 
necessity he was bound to push the powers of the crown 
beyond all limit. All the feudal rights which had fallen 
into abeyance were enforced with renewed vigour. But 
with the adoption of all the devices and abuses of his an¬ 
cestors, it was necessary, if possible, to invent new modes 

R 


362 


ILLEGAL TAXATION. 


of obtaining pecuniary aid. Bacon, we have seen, pro¬ 
mises to be a fruitful treasurer. By fines of recusants, 
by confiscations of persons already persecuted, as well 
as by parliamentary power and the Star Chamber, he 
would, doubtless, have kept a fair Exchequer. He would 
as little as James have scrupled upon the means of raising 
money; but he would have defended it in the Commons, 
well knowing that while men can talk, they rarely act, 
and, moreover, knowing that much more might be obtained 
by fair speeches,. by eloquence, by parliamentary corrup¬ 
tion and his system of undertakers* than by any other 
means. James did not like Parliaments. They interfered 
with, his absurd notions of Kingly dignity. He would raise 
money by the high hand and without consent of the other 
estates of the realm; by means of confiscations, by 
knighthood, as we have seen, by the sale of public offices, 
by fines in the Star Chamber, by Benevolences, and other 
illegal assessments. 

Now, a mode of raising money by what was termed 
a Benevolence had been an abuse in English government 
for two or three hundred years. Unlike monopolies, it 
was an old evil that had been from time to time revived 
by Monarchs as they were more or less encumbered, 
needy, or extravagant. But it was an illegal mode of 
obtaining money. It was against the fundamental laws 
of the realm that money should be raised except by a 
vote in Parliament—a vote of both houses properly con¬ 
stituted. The Benevolence was only another name for an 
illegal tax—a tax without the consent of Parliament—an 
arbitrary exaction. It was a pretence to beg of the sub¬ 
ject. To ask him to give, of his own free will, what he 



RANK IMPOSITIONS. 


363 


would be punished for denying. It was the request of the 
footpad, who politely requests you to present him with your 
money, but who submits the other alternative, injury to 
your person. It was no more a Benevolence than a threat 
of your money or your life is a benevolence. Men had 
been Star Chambered, imprisoned, sent out of the country, 
and like Uriah put in the front of battle—for refusing. 
The evil was so monstrous, the abuse so flagrant and so 
well known, that a statute had been made as far back as 
Richard III.’s day, declaring all Benevolences null and 
void. They were rank impositions all. The consequence 
was, they fell somewhat into disfavour. Henry VII., 
with his inordinate avarice, revived them, but only to a 
limited extent; so did his son, Henry VIII. Once or 
twice during her reign Elizabeth had had recourse to them. 
But the dangers to the state were imminent; her needs 
large ; her enemies terrible; and the people gave with 
willingness. 

For it must be confessed, a gift demanded in time of 
peace, assumes a much more flagrant aspect than one 
merely asked to meet immediate, urgent, and other¬ 
wise overwhelming necessities. James being at peace, 
calling no parliament, was induced by his advisers,— 
from the evidence it would seem, at Bacon’s own instance 
—to levy a Benevolence. From end to end of the King¬ 
dom the attempt excited discontent; but, as usual, no man 
felt inclined to throw himself forward to be the first 
victim of Royal wrath. As usual, many murmured— 
and paid. Precisely as in the illegal attempt to levy 
ship-money by Charles, the burden would have been 
sustained, but for one man being willing to sacrifice himself 

r 2 


364 


OLIVER ST. JOHN. 


as the victim, and to throw himself into the breach. The 
political organization of the time was circumscribed. The 
communication between different towns was difficult and 
tedious. London was as much removed from Liverpool, or 
from Bristol, as it is now from the shores of the Mediter¬ 
ranean, or the coast of Spain. 

The consequence was, that the woes of one town were no 
grievance to those of another. In the absence of news¬ 
papers, a rising in Taunton was no encouragement to the 
men of Lincoln, for there was no intercommunication, 
and consequently little sympathy. Every town was, in 
consequence, isolated, dependent on its own resources, 
liable to be attacked and beaten in detail, for any opposi¬ 
tion, whether moral or physical, to the throne. This made 
local political agitation dangerous, while general or national 
political agitation, was all but impossible. This alone can 
account for the terrible infractions of liberty attempted 
by James and Charles, and, for the most part, sustained 
with impunity. At the same time the very fact of the 
danger of refusal, made the refusal, when once made, 
dangerous and serious, for there was no alternative but 
to go forward—the danger which hindered advance, as 
effectually prevented return. 

At last a patriot was found willing to throw himself 
into the breach. His name was Oliver St. John *—Black 
Oliver St. John, Mr. Dixon calls him, because he intends 
to blacken him. He had been a distinguished member of 

* He was, says the Harleian MS., afterwards Lord Grandison, and 
Lieutenant of Ireland. His trial was the occasion of Raleigh’s tract, 

‘ Oll the Prerogative of Parliaments,’ which no doubt hastened Sir 
Walter’s death, and excited Bacon’s animosity, as he is referred to in it. 



COURTEOUS LANGUAGE. 


365 


parliament. He was a lawyer, either by profession or as 
part of his education. He was fully aware of the illegality 
of the King’s act. Thoroughly informed on this point, he 
rebelled against the exaction. He, if no other, would 
come forward, would contest it. He wrote a letter to the 
Mayor of Marlborough, stating, in very moderate language, 
the legal reasons why such an imposition was illegal, and 
as, being illegal, improper. His letter is printed in 
the 4 Cabala,’ and is copied into the State Trials, and may 
be inspected there by any person. It commences by 
stating,— 

44 That this kind of Benevolence is against law, reason, 
and religion. 1st. The law is in the statute called 
Magna Charta, 9 Hen. III., cap. 29. That no freeman 
be anyway destroyed, but by laws of the land. That it is 
against the statute 25 Ed. I., cap. 5 & 6, that any free 
grant or aid be taken by the king but by assent of 
the realm, and for the good of the same. And in the 
1st Richard III., cap. 2. That the subjects and Commons 
in this realm, henceforth shall in no wise be charged 
by any imposition called a Benevolence; and that such 
exaction shall be damned and annulled for ever.” 

This is the tone of the letter, this the nature of the 
remonstrance. It cannot be declared turbulent; yet 
Mr. Dixon, bent on misleading his readers, declares him 
the O’Brien or the O’Conor of his day. St. John simply 
demurred in temperate manner, to a lawless exaction. 
But again the Editor of the 4 Athenaeum ’ attempts to 
heap infamy on the dead; again invents slanders ; again 
creates obscene falsehoods to blacken a virtuous memory. 
He declares him “the Marlborough Bully,” and 44 an 


366 


PRETTY FICTIONS. 


impudent and whining demagogue pronounces him “ a 
man of a stormy and yet slavish spirit, who, when the gate 
of his cell creaks upon its hinges, begins to whine and 
cry ; and as begging, fawning, and groaning to be let out; 
and declares that those who make an idol of every one 
barred in the Tower, turn from this pusillanimous and 
crouching prisoner in disgust.” 

This is again hyper-historic history. It is, of course, not 
the fact. It is opposed to the facts. No one that I know of 
ever turned from him in disgust, for begging, or fawning, 
or groaning to be let out. Mr. St. John wrote a very 
penitential letter to the King when he was in jail, and had 
been fined 5,000/., asking pardon. It was not a whit 
more abject than many of Francis Bacon’s own letters, 
when in the height of his prosperity and a triumphant 
man. Oliver St. John was not of that material of which the 
noblest martyrs are made, certainly. He had sufficiently 
proved his independence of spirit, by standing up single- 
handed against regal oppression. Clapped into prison, 
on low diet, in fear of torture perchance—for Peacham 
is being racked near his cell—or of the death which 
Overbury will soon after meet; deserted by those who 
should have supported him, it is no wonder that his 
courage gave way. Many men will fight most resolutely 
in a good cause, well supported, who are disinclined to 
encounter a solitary risk where there is much danger, and 
no chance of profit or honour. He was, doubtless, such a 
man. He found himself the solitary victim—the scape¬ 
goat of the rest. This was a point of honour he did not 
covet. He was ruined in estate. Possibly he had a wife 
and children clamouring at his heart. Shall he sacrifice 



SIR FRANCIS BUSY. 


367 


all, for those who will sacrifice nothing for him ? He has 
been twelve months, or even more, in prison, and he 
wishes for release. He does not recant anything he has 
said. He does not fawn, he does not whine—he petitions 
humbly, as prisoners do. There is nothing in history 
against bis fairest fame and honour, except the humble 
spirit of this letter, the whole of the offence of which is com¬ 
prised in one sentence, which may arise from error of judg¬ 
ment. Yet Mr. Dixon has not only dared to falsify every¬ 
thing concerning him, but employs the harsh phrases 1 
have indicated, further to blacken him. 

While Peacham is in the Tower, this Mr. St. John and 
Owen, charged with treason, are also awaiting their trial. 
Sir Francis Bacon has plenty of business on his hands. 
He writes to the King almost daily. The Chancellor is 
expected to die. Peacham has to be racked and examined. 
Witnesses against him obtained. Letters written to his 
diocesan. Owen to be enmeshed in the toils of the law. In¬ 
dictments have to be framed; the judges coerced ; the King 
to be informed of progress; Oliver St. John to be punished 
with some show of law: here, indeed, is occupation 
worthy of the mind of Bacon. Feb. 7th, Bacon expresses 
a wish that Peacham were first settled and done with, 
because “that would make the example upon St. John 
to stand for all.” On the 11th, he writes concerning 
Owen, and what he has done towards proving it treason. 
On the 12th, to say, “ Your worthy Chancellor, I fear, 
goeth this day. God hath hitherto used to weed out 
such servants as grew not fit for your Majesty, but now 
he hath gathered a true sage out of your garden ; but your 
Majesty's service must not be mortal.” 


368 


INTELLECTUAL DIRECTNESS. 


He goes on to beg the place, and point out how it may 
be accomplished. Next to disparage possible competitors. 

“ If you take my Lord Coke, this will follow : first, your 
Majesty shall put an overruling nature into an overruling 
place, which may breed an extreme ; next, you shall blunt 
his industry in matters of finance which seemeth to aim at 
another place. And, lastly, popular men are no sure 
mounters for your Majesty’s saddle. If you take my Lord 
Hubbard, you shall have a judge at the upper end of your 
council board and another at the lower end, whereby your 
Majesty will find your Prerogative pent. If you take my 
Lord of Canterbury, I will say no more, but the Chancellor’s 
place requires a whole man. And to have both jurisdictions 
spiritual and temporal in that height, is fit but for a King.” 

There is no modesty about Sir Francis. No shame 
about blasting other men’s characters. He goes without 
scruple, like Richard the Third, and as intellectually and 
passionless, straight to his point. He does not hate these 
men. He simply would brush them away like flies. How 
well balanced is the last sentence to ruin my Lord of Can¬ 
terbury! no waste of words, but the happy suggestion 
that he might be a dangerous subject. That will settle my 
Lord of Canterbury much better than abuse. We shall 
have more of this wise defamation by-and-by. 

He proceeds to give his own qualifications. He has 
interest, and with those parliament men, who are “ cardo 
rerum,” he will pack the bench. “ It is as an overseer 
over judges, as a planter of fit justices, that Bacon knoweth 
his duty, and that it concerns the King to be advised * 

“ If God calls the Chancellor,” Bacon is ready, with all 
* ‘Cabala.’ 



AGAIN SUBTLETY. 


3(J9 


the warrants and commissions prepared—everything, in 
fact, to enable him to step into the dying man’s shoes. 
But he is not dead yet; gets better directly. Indeed, the 
wish was father to the thought. Nor is he to die for two 
years, so that Bacon will have still some time anxiously 
to wait. 

At this time, moreover, to add to Bacon’s labours, a 
quarrel has sprung up between Coke and Ellesmere, the 
Chancellor, as to the superior jurisdiction of the Court of 
Chancery. Bacon, of course, sides with the Chancellor 
against Coke; and on the 15th of February—that is, 
three days after Bacon wrote his last letter—there is an 
allusion to the quarrel in his correspondence. In this 
letter—that is, of the 15th—printed 35 Vol. XII. of 
Montagu, I am compelled to place a very harsh construc¬ 
tion. I regret it the more that the meaning is not 
obvious, but doubtful—very vaguely expressed. But after 
careful consideration it seems open to the imputation of 
suggesting that, as Ellesmere is recovering and likely to 
be soon out of danger, and as the quarrel continues, it 
were better for the cause of justice that another Chancellor 
should be appointed. Directly, of course, it does not say 
this. It is not likely that it would. Such a step would 
neither be consonant with Bacon’s nature, nor wise under 
the circumstances. The step would be perilous. It hints 
merely that while the sickness of the Chancellor is mend¬ 
ing, the sickness of his court is getting worse; and that 
the cure of the one will be easier than the other. He 
then hoped that community of service would have hindered 
his Majesty’s servants from quarrelling. “ But pardon 


370 


ATTEMPT TO OVERAWE JUDGES. 


me, I humbly pray your Majesty, if I have too reasonable 
thoughts.” 

On the 21st, he launches another long letter at the 
King, containing much information on the law of the con¬ 
test between the King’s Bench and .Chancery Courts, and 
among other things, a reason why my Lord Coke should 
be disgraced at this time. 

This letter contains a clever disparagement of Coke in 
the style already indicated, but without any great finesse, 
pretending to no animosity, but at the same time bent on 
disparagement. “ Lord Coke was perchance not privy to 
the insult thus thrown on the King’s prerogative by the 
slight given to Chancery, which James has long since made 
a personal matter, though I confess it be suspicious. His 
error was rather that he did not divert it in some good 
manner. At the same time the insult to the Chancellor, 
at the time he was supposed to be dying, was barbarous.” 
“ Nor should the defiance of the Court of Chancery (which 
is the court of your absolute power) pass lightly, or end 
only in some formal atonement, but used to strengthen 
your prerogative, according to the rules of monarchy.” 

How basely, how slavishly, how wickedly, how traitor¬ 
ously to his oath, Bacon here advised the King, to the 
violation of the law, and to the injury of the subject, is 
here seen. But the next passages are even worse:— 

“If it is true, as it is reported, that the puisne judges 
did stir in this business, I do think that judge worthy to 
lose his place. There can be no better thing, at this 
time; nothing more likely to conduce to the King’s wel¬ 
fare, than upon a just and jit occasion to make some 






CULMINATING INIQUITY. 


371 


example against the presumption of a judge, in causes that 
concern your Majesty , whereby the whole body of those 
magistrates may be contained in better awe,” the example 
being bettered, spite of any injustice to the individual, 
by such a person being “ rude (like Coke), and that no 
man cares for.” 

If the King should doubt his power in such a case to 
punish a judge for giving an adverse verdict, for being 
just; in opposition to his own interest, for being honest and 
upright, Bacon knows of a precedent. He will not say 
that there be any in fault (God forbid !), yet he thinks 
“ that the very presumption of going so far in such a case 
worthy of a punishment once before applied ; the judges 
having once, to answer before Elizabeth on their knees, 
and Lord Wrey, being then chief justice, was deprived of 
his dignity, and stripped of his robes;—“ slipped his 
collar” is the Baconian phrase. This admirable sug¬ 
gestion, and doubtless, in Bacon’s eyes, “excellent pre¬ 
cedent,” deserving, like many others from the same 
source, to be enshrined in Machiavelli’s Prince, winding 
up with the advice, emphatically expressed, that the King 
should keep the judges in their places, limit their juris¬ 
dictions, and punish them for contumacy. 

St. John was tried on the 15th of April, 1615, Bacon 
prosecuting as Attorney-General.* In his duty as advocate 

* It will very possibly be found that one or two of the letters in tin's 
book have been attributed to a year preceding or succeeding that in 
which they were written. On this point no previous biographer serves 
as a guide. In Lord Campbell and Mr. Montagu, occurrences are 
placed as transpiring in different years, which are actually alluded to 
in the same letter. Twelve months is presumed to have elapsed be¬ 
tween the trials of St. Jolin and Peacham and the Chancellor’s illness, 


372 


THE ACCUSATION OF ST. JOHN. 


he is bound to urge everything that he can against 
Mr. St. John ; hut he in no way impeaches him either in 
reputation, character, or fame. He states that he is, “ as 
it seems, of an ancient house and name ; his offence, that 
he hath upon advice—not suddenly by his pen, nor by 
the slip of his tongue; not privately, or in a corner, but 
publicly, as it were, to the face of the King’s ministers and 
justices—slandered and traduced the King our sovereign, 
the law of the land, the parliament, and infinite particulars 
of his Majesty’s worthy and loving subjects. Nay, the 
slander is of that nature, that it might seem to interest the 
people in grief and discontent against the state. Whence 
might have ensued matter of murmur and sedition. So 
that it is not a simple slander, but a seditious slander, like 
to that the Poet speaketh of 4 calamosque armare veneno ,’ 
4 a venemous dart that hath both iron and poison.’ ” 

This is the opening. After some irrelevant matter, he 
proceeds to say that this Benevolence is not a Benevolence 
pure and simple: “You may take it, if you will, as an 
advance or provisional help until a future parliament, or 
as a gratification simply, without any relation to a parlia¬ 
ment ; you can noways take it amiss. The letters were 


yet Bacon, in a note to the King, speaks of both as pending. By Mr. 
Montagu’s mode of editing the letters, confusion is even worse con¬ 
founded. Indeed he seems to have given up the task of arrangement 
in despair; while the frequently incorrect dates he has assigned have 
much increased the difficulty of followers in the same path. As a con¬ 
sequence of all this irregularity, it is difficult for any one to ascertain 
whether Ellesmere was once or twice at the point of death. Lord 
Oamphell fixes his illness in 1616 ; yet Bacon’s letter of January 29, 
1614, vol. xvi., p. 165, Montagu, mentions his imminent danger, and 
this is merely one of several instances. 






AN INSTRUCTOR OF LORD CAMPBELL. 


373 


rather like letters of news, what was done at London, 
than otherwise; and we know 4 exempla ducunt, non 
trahunt,’ examples they do but lead, they do not draw 
nor drive. The third is that it was not done by commis¬ 
sion under the great seal; a thing warranted by a multi¬ 
tude of precedents, both ancient and of late time, as you 
shall hear anon.” The fourth and fifth reasons are, in 
effect, that being a Benevolence, the gift was not compul¬ 
sory, a mode of reasoning as old as the iniquity, and 
which the statute of Richard was specially framed to 
meet; that it was by letters of the council, and not by 
letters patent under the King’s seal, and further draws a 
distinction between Benevolences that were exactions and 
Benevolences which were free gifts.* 

Now it would take, undoubtedly, a great deal of 
eloquence to persuade men that letters asking aid, in the 
form of a Benevolence, were like letters of news. But the 
language throughout is temperate, and, as Bacon’s manner 
is, courteous. Once or twice he does, of course, as might 
be expected, stigmatize the paper as a slander and as a 
wicked calumny against the King , but there is nothing to 
depreciate the character of St. John, no such charges 
as I have adverted to, as having been recently made. In 
fact, only sufficient attack, to secure a verdict, and prove 
the man a criminal, for what was wanted was not so 
much punishment as example, “discipline,” to produce 
terror in others. 

I may here, as a rather amusing circumstance to again 
relieve the tedium of this dry book, allude to another effort 
of the Author of 4 A Personal History of Lord Bacon,’ to 
* State Trials, vol. ii., p. 902 ; Montagu, vol. vi., p. 138. 


374 


GEORGE VILLIERS. 


teach our then Chancellor—law. The point is too good to 
pass unnoticed. Lord Campbell’s censor, really thinks 
the Benevolence a free gift. The question, says this 
legal oracle, instructing his pupil, “ was not one of law, 
but one of fact.” How infinitely obliged must the Great 
Lawyer have felt for this tuition ! 

Bacon knew that the legality of the thing would not 
stand for an instant, and so he tried St. John on an in¬ 
formation for writing and publishing a paper against it. 
The whole trial was unconstitutional. It was in the Star 
Chamber, an unconstitutional court, opposed to Magna 
Charta It was not a trial of a free man by his peers. 
There were no witnesses; but it was a trial to gain five 
thousand pounds for the King’s Exchequer, and frighten 
the disaffected. There was no need to go into the law 
of Benevolences, for the verdict was no doubt secure 
before the man was tried. In the one manner the verdict 
would have been doubtful, in the other it was certain. 

In the same year Bacon prosecuted John Owen, Richard 
Weston, Anne "Turner, Janies Franklin, and Sir John 
Elwes, for the Overbury murder. The great criminals— 
Northampton, Somerset, and his wife—as usual with 
justice in those days, contriving to escape, while the 
wretched subordinates were duly hung. Sir John Holies, 
afterwards Earl of Clare, Mr. Wentw orth, and Mr. Lums- 
den. were likewise prosecuted in the Star Chamber for 
traducing public justice in connection with those trials, in 
having asserted that Weston was unjustly punished; they 
being fined heavily, and sent to the Tower. 

And here we must step aside to note that the Somersets 
would not have been brought to the bar of justice per- 


bacon’s offer of servitude. 


375 


chance, but from the fact that James had now another 
lover, George Villiers, a younger son of Sir George Villiers 
and Mary Beaumont, born in 1592. In 1613 he had 
been taken into the King’s household, being appointed cup¬ 
bearer. From the day that James first saw him, Somer¬ 
set’s fortunes had declined. From some fear, however, of 
that personage, who held some secret inimical to James in 
his bosom, which has been differently attributed, but which 
undeniably existed, he did not discard him altogether, but 
temporised merely. The Overbury murder gave an 
excuse for his final disgrace, the more so that Coke had 
already obtained a large amount of evidence implicating 
Somerset and his wife, which, as he had alluded to it in 
open court, might be difficult to conceal or thrust aside. 
The King was now fairly off with his old love, and on 
with his new. 

Somerset had been of parts too contemptible to be a 
dangerous rival, or even a useful patron to Bacon, since 
his rise in favour and friendship with the king. Villiers, 
on the contrary, speedily showed himself a courtier 
dangerous to Bacon’s vast ambition and dearest hopes. 
Bacon knew what a King’s favourite was. He knew the 
danger of crossing such persons. He was in no state yet 
to be the sole and prime adviser of his monarch, nor even 
on sufficiently friendly terms to be first at court. We find 
him, therefore, paying early court to this boy. In 1615, 
when Villiers was not quite twenty-three, we find him 
writing to solicit his friendship and aid. In a letter pub¬ 
lished by Montagu, with the date February 10th, 1615, 
but which is possibly February, 1616, as it alludes to the 
Chancellor’s ill health, he writes in terms of familiarity 


376 THE DIVINITY “ THAT SHAPES OUR ENDS.” 

and almost friendship, but to which there is the following 
postscript: — 

“ Sir,—I humbly thank you for your inward letter. I 
have burned it as you commanded ; but the flame it hath 
kindled in me will never be extinguished.” In a letter 
February 25th, we find further attack and disparagement 
of Coke.* Two days after he is treating with Sir George 
Villiers, to be appointed of the Privy Council,—not to 
benefit himself but the state ; finishing with the assertion 
that I have no greater ambition than this, that as the 
King showeth himself to you the best master, so I might 
be found your best servant. On the 21st,*)" he has written, 
that as the Chancellor is improving, he would go on with 
his motion to assist him to the councillorship; and this 
letter of the 27th was a reminder. Truly Bacon believed 
that heaven helps those who help themselves. 

Meanwhile James is working out his destiny. He will 
draw the strings of prerogative till the cords crack—pull 
at the curb, till the horse rears and falls on his back. The 
serious business of James’s life, is to rule without parlia¬ 
ments—to get money by prerogative. The one condition 
is dependent on the other. There is a couplet already 
framed, that shows the popular belief that parliaments are 
only called by James to grant subsidies and to be dis¬ 
solved. Bacon, to a needy King, to a monarch bent on 
prerogative, is the precise instrument fitted by heaven for 
his hand. Yet Bacon has an evil genius, and never attains 
that precise place that his talents and ambition deserve. 
Like the mythic Yanderdecken he beats about but makes 

* ‘ CabalaMontagu, vol. xii., p. 35. 

t Montagu, vol. xii., pp. 143 and 148. 



IDENTITY OF THOUGHT. 


377 


no way. As Saturn’s ring he is “ never close, though 
ever nigh.” Hope increases while it satisfies the appetite. 
There can be little question that for his own good, happi¬ 
ness, and ambition, and for James’s own benefit, that is, 
comfort and peace of mind, Bacon would have been the 
best minister he could have had. But Providence for 
humanity’s sake ordained otherwise. Bacon will plot 
and contrive to make money for the King, will fetch and 
carry ; will make his Master famous in history, torture his 
enemies, hut he will never be Prime Minister. When 
the apple is within reach, a boy of eighteen, on the 
strength of a pretty face and a handsome person, with a 
strong will, good courage, and active mind, will come in 
and snatch the fruit from his grasp. 

From Francis Bacon’s Attorneyship to the peerage, 
James rules as prime minister without a Parliament. 
Now would Bacon’s genius shine. Yet it cannot be. 
His wish is granted, and as so often happens, it is granted 
fraught with ruin. ’Tis the fable of Phoebus over again. 
He hopes to drive the Parliament: it becomes restive, 
furious, turns and crushes him. 

The acute reader will perceive that there is so much 
poverty of intellect between James and his great Attorney, 
that they have often the same image in common. The 
King says he is “ like a mirror to the people Bacon pro¬ 
tests that “ the house is a mirror to the King ”—such grace 
is it to employ a King’s phrases. The image has done a 
great deal of work, has been shuffled backward and for¬ 
ward till neither Francis Bacon nor James can tell to 
whom it belongs. The Monarch thinks it his, and that 
Francis Bacon is his scholar. Mr. Francis Bacon knows 


378 


STRENGTH WITH POLICY. 


whose it is, but he likes to learn of men wiser than 
himself. 

Bacon is in full tide of glory. The stream still rises on 
which he like a stout swimmer swims. There is plenty of 
work for him as Attorney, much more as statesman. 
Somerset is to be tried in 1616. Villiers has to be led. 
The King daily corresponded with. Supplies raised. 
Judges kept in order, for this matter of supply makes them 
in great part the arbiters of justice. Prosecutions in the 
Exchequer to punish troublesome, seditious, or mutinous 
persons, in other words, for the fines and penalties, having 
superseded the regular business. 

Bacon is very anxious to become a Privy Councillor, he 
can then help the King so much more fully. Here are his 
own reasons, written in a letter, February 27th, 1616:— 
“ Sure I am there never were times which more require a 
King’s Attorney to be well armed; and as I once said to 
you, to wear a gauntlet and not a glove. The arrange¬ 
ments, when they proceed (the Somerset arrangements), 
the contention between the Chancery and King’s Bench, 
the great cause of the ‘ rege inconsulto,’ which is so pre¬ 
cious to the King’s Prerogative, divers other services that 
concern the King’s revenue, and the repair of his estate.” 
So the French proverb of the iron hand and velvet fingers, 
is, after all, perhaps Baconian. An iron hand is needed 
to crush these rebellious and factious Englishmen. 

On the 3rd of June, he is, at his own wish, so generous is 
fortune, sworn of the privy council—the honour being made 
conditional on his abandoning his practice as an advocate, 
though his permission to give counsel in weighty matters 
is continued, and with the King’s consent he may, in matters 






MAN PROPOSES—HEAVEN DISPOSES. 


379 


of great importance, be allowed to plead. No letter pray¬ 
ing for these last concessions exists ; but doubtless it is at 
his own suggestion, in order that he may the better serve 
his Majesty. He, consequently, from this time may be 
considered as turning his back on the law, and as becoming 
a statesman, but following the law as a pastime. Affairs of 
state being henceforward his chief employment. To the 
perseverance, the unanimity of effort, heaven has at last 
decreed the reward of early aspirations fulfilled. He is 
henceforth a ruler among men. In a short time he will be 
Chancellor. Then having gained all, he will be happy. 
His early hopes are crowned. This is man’s belief. 
Certainly; if the gods out of our pleasant vices do not 
make whips to scourge us. 

Before entering the council and finally giving up prac¬ 
tice, fortune grants him one more favour. He is prose¬ 
cutor in another case of duelling. With such a case his 
services as public prosecutor, attorney-general, and direct 
servant of the king, commenced ; with such another case 
they will end. Two years before he had prosecuted Mr. 
William Priest, for sending a challenge, and a stick which 
was to be the length of the weapon, and had obtained in 
the Star Chamber for the king’s treasury, 500Z. The mes¬ 
senger Wright being fined as many marks. The valiant 
Mr. Hutchest, who declined' the challenge, having the 
gratification of seeing them both fined. In July 1616, 
he prosecutes Mr. Markham for the same offence, for 
sending a challenge to Lord Darcy. 

James has a hatred of fighting. His motto shows his 
distaste for war in any shape. But his fear of deadly 
weapons, shown in his shutting his eyes at the unsheathing 


380 


THE CRIME OF DUELLING. 


of a sword, prompts him to be very harsh as to duels. 
Bacon, as his mouthpiece, is severe too Some of his 
Eulogists have discovered a great liberality in his notions 
as to this detestable and absurd custom. I see in it no 
excessive proof of liberality. James has from the first 
expressed himself strongly against such heathenish prac¬ 
tices. Thus, as is often the case, reform springs from 
prejudice rather than reason—from an accident rather 
than policy. The real life of the feudal system of chivalry 
is dead. Jousts and tournaments are now mere mockeries. 
There are no Saracens to fight. No white and red roses 
to uphold. Castles are no longer the abodes of serving- 
men and retainers. The cities are great powers. Mer¬ 
chants and traders have become important. Yet the 
proud and jealous Spaniard has invented a stupid law of 
‘ duello,’ which the Italian, by means of a new weapon, 
the rapier, has made dangerous. The subtlety of 
an Italian invention has given substance to the folly 
The Englishman has adopted it. Travellers come from 
beyond the seas to swagger like Pistol or Parolles, at 
London ordinaries. The thing is alien to the soil. 
But certain men still think it a notable custom to retain 
this barbaric argument in place of the more reasonable 
ones demanded by civilized society. Lord Bacon is the 
instrument of James, in putting down the custom. 

Thus in every end is Bacon the King’s. In his policy, 
in his law, in state, and in private opinion, in questions of 
general importance and questions of detail, he is the 
King’s, and the King’s only. As he writes many years 
after, begging for reinstatement in favour, he is “ never in 
nineteen years’ service chidden by his Majesty.” His 




THE KING’S “GOOD HUSBAND.” 381 

monarch’s arm has been over him in his council; he 
carries his picture in metal over his heart, and deeply- 
graven in his heart. His royal patron calls him—so 
faithful is he—his “ good husbanddeclares that he has 
a glozing manner, bears himself “ suavibus modis,” most 
after his own heart. The zealous servant protests that 
these praises are his food. If the entertainment is Lenten, 
Timon’s self might be gratified at its fitness. 

But the people—How stand they affected to Bacon ? 
He has now for many years played double courses success¬ 
fully. He has never growm very unpopular. He has 
about him all those attractions and graces of manner 
w r hich are much more effectual in winning the popular 
breath, than any virtue hidden under a churlish exterior. 
It is true the world is wise, and gives its praise and 
popularity wLere it neither gives its love nor worship. 
Essex was loved by the people. When he died a whole 
people w r as estranged. Men cried ballads up and dow n 
in defiance of law, and punishment, and the jail, that told 
about the noble Earl. They revived his memory in a 
thousand forms. They framed a narrative false as may 
be, answering to the Eidolon they had set up in the 
sanctuary of their own hearts. Like the false god made 
by Micah, it is a little one put up in their own tent, but 
is much prayed to. They declared that Essex was mur¬ 
dered. That Lady Nottingham betrayed him. That the 
Queen and Essex were lovers, and that when one died, 
the other pined broken-hearted away. 

Francis Bacon has no such sympathy of warm hearts. 
When he falls no man will pity him. No friendly hand 
w ill be stretched out, no letters written by loyal friends, 


382 


CONTEMPT FOR MISERY. 


pouring out the wealth of their warm love. He is popular, 
but he is not esteemed. To him this is no injury. He 
despises the world, he despises men. His eyes are bent 
on abstractions, on ideal things. Not on the welfare of 
humanity; not the happiness of families ; not the griefs, 
sorrows, or sufferings of the poor. Though he is generous, 
he has no sympathy for poverty, or misery, or distress. 
Once, many years ago, when he was young and green, 
in his “salad days,” he pleaded for the poor Yeoman. 
But his eloquence did not picture the miseries of a starving 
people, of a wretched peasantry, exhausted by burdens, of 
a nation groaning under vile exactions. He painted no 
semblance of sin, and crime, and poverty, running ram¬ 
pant like escaped beasts of prey, as the result of fiscal 
oppression, of unnatural taxation, of perverted justice. 
Once after, he sighed for a deserted country, but it was a 
sigh softened by policy, tempered by a picturesque poetry. 
The image recurred to him through a classic medium. 
It came not from his heart. It was a diluted feeling, 
which a second-hand expression would serve. A man 
pleading from his heart for misery for a great grievance, 
would have urged it in other than Virgil’s words, and 
have looked at it through other than Virgil’s eyes. But 
age has even dimmed his perception of truth, his sympathy 
with humanity. Statecraft and ambition have deadened 
his poetic appreciation of misery. Men are mere counters. 
An ideal end of fame, of worldly greatness, has absorbed 
the mighty soul. The philosophic eye, which eagle-like 
can gaze on the sun, revels in as daring a flight in the 
world of fact. To be a Chancellor and the minister of 
a King was once as vague and as bold a thought as any- 


bacon’s notions of honour. 


383 


thing propounded in Bacon’s philosophy. Bacon’s prac¬ 
tical measures have brought it nearer. The briefless 
barrister is now a privy councillor of the realm. Thwarted 
often, driven back on himself, he has persevered, alike 
through good and bad report. But as his heart has grown, 
if possible, colder, the world of shadows has been elevated 
above the world of fact. He has come to despise men. 
To scorn dishonour ;—the profoundest degradation, even 
the supremest contempt of his fellows, in his race for 
visionary happiness and power. 

His own notion of Honour has in his Essays, of the 
Edition of 1597, been expressed :—“ If a man perform 
that which hath not been attempted before, or attempted, 
and given over, or hath been achieved, but not with so 
good circumstance, he shall purchase more honour than 
by affecting a matter of greater difficulty or virtue, wherein 
he is but a follower. If a man so temper his actions as 
in some one of them he do content every faction or com¬ 
bination of people, the Musick will be the fuller.” 

He has also given us his estimate of the greatness 
of princes, and of subjects. “ That founders of states are 
first; next lawgivers; then liberatores ; fourth, propug- 
natores imperii, or princes who enlarge their means by 
battle ; fifth, and in the last place, fathers of their country 
—patres patriae—which reign justly, and make the times 
good, whenever they live. 

Bacon’s theory is Pagan not Christian; it is derived 
from poetry, not from the Testament. HCacus is greater 
than Gaius or Ulpian; Agamemnon than Socrates; 
Romulus than the Saviour. He does not believe that 


384 


FIRST EDITION OF BACON’S ESSAYS. 


Father—Our Father—is the chief title of honour; that 
to be a pater patriae is the loftiest instead of the least 
honour. Yet Divine wisdom taught otherwise. Not our 
Creator, not our Euler, our King, or our Majesty, we are 
taught is the supreme title of honour, but Our Father. 
So falls Bacon’s philosophy of honour, short. 

The first edition of Bacon’s Essays was published in 1597. 
They were then only ten in number, brief, and were on— 

1. Study. 

2. Of Cause. 

3. Of Ceremonies and Respects. 

4. Followers and Friends. 

5. Suitors. 

6. Expense. 

7. Regimen of Health. 

8. Honour and Reputation. 

9 Faction. 

10. Of Negotiating. 

In 1606, they were republished with very small varia¬ 
tions. In 1612 he published another edition, dedicated 
to his brother-in-law, Sir John Constable. He had 
intended to dedicate them to the Prince of Wales, but 
was frustrated by that young prince’s death. 

The Essays were increased to forty, and include one 
on Great Place. 

In 1613 there was another edition, substantially the 
same as that of 1612, but with differences. In 1625, 
there was another. In 1612 the Essay No. 8, Of 
Honour and Reputation, was cut out. But in L625 it 


SHAKSPERE ON AMBITION. 


385 


again appears, enlarged and amplified. The adventurous 
barrister is now advancing, but when he has attained the 
summit of his ambition he will write :—“ It is a strange 
desire, to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek 
power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self. 
The rising unto 'place is laborious , and by pains men come 
to greater pains; and it is sometimes base ; and by indig¬ 
nities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, 
and the regress is either a downfall , or at least an eclipse, 
which is a melancholy thing.” This is place in contem¬ 
plation—as seen retrospectively. What it is in prospect 
we will again trace. He has suffered, yet how much more 
grandly does the poet rise on his theme—the poor manager, 
the quasi butcher’s son—when treating of the fall of 
Wolsey!— 

“ Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition ; 

By that sin fell the angels; how can man then, 

The image of his Maker, hope to win by t ? 

Love thyself last: cherish those hearts that hate thee ; 
Corruption wins not more than honesty. 

Still in thy right band carry gentle peace, 

To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not: 

Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s, 

Thy God’s, and truth’s ; then if thou fall’st, O Cromwell, 

Thou fall’st a blessed martyr.” 

Bacon has aided the King in every unconstitutional mea¬ 
sure which has been attempted. In the monstrous attempt 
to sustain the system of plurality of livings. By which one 
dignitary can engross to himself the incomes of several men, 
and perform only the labours of one. By which spiritual 
ends are made the mere subject of pecuniary benefit, and 
the work of the Church slighted to make profit to those, 
whom the King delighted to honour. He has been the 

s 


<• 


386 


CLASSIC NOT CHRISTIAN ART. 


energetic defender of Benevolences, of uncontrolled and 
absolute monarchy, of the Monarch's right to overturn 
laws by mere proclamation, as appendages to his prero¬ 
gative. In the work of tampering with the judges, and 
impairing the dignity of the bench, the statesman by love, 
the lawyer only by necessity, has been prompt. 

How far this course is indicated in his literature may 
be seen. 

In that very Essay of 1597, he has conveyed that he 
thinks the greatest subject of a monarch is adviser to the 
King—Prime Minister. The next the leader of armies. 
The third the favourite of the King. The fourth the am¬ 
bassadors, and those who, having great place, execute it 
with sufficiency. He has no word for public benefactors, 
none for men who stand up for a nation oppressed:. None 
for tribunes of the people. Not a word for men of letters. 
Even calamity does not teach him. After his fall 
his notions are the same. Csesar, Romulus, Cyrus, 
Othman, Ishmael, he places at the head of Kings. His 
notions are pagan. He represents the classic renais¬ 
sance rather than the old Gothic. Shakspere is English 
Norse, and his art is Christian. Bacon is the tran¬ 
sition, more pagan than Christian. Milton will be 
wholly classic. He will treat, with classic and pagan 
feeling, even a Christian theme. Make the language 
pagan, the thoughts pagan, the sentiments pagan, and 
the very construction and idea pagan—a mere Iliad. 
Bacon’s ideal sphere of glory is infused only with images 
of grandeur and worldly splendour. He has no word for 
the still loftier love of man—for the persecuted apostle of 
a religion so mighty, a creed so wondrous, that without 





PEACTICAL MEANS TO AN END. 


387 


force, by inherent strength alone—had men been content 
to follow its precepts—would have permeated the entire 
universe of men. Fused all national creeds and distinc¬ 
tions into one. Destroyed all differences of law, and 
colour, and race. Not even for the apostle of truth dying 
for his love of truth, Socrates, has he a word. 

Francis Bacon is a worldly man. Utility is his highest 
good. The end of all his philosophy and practice. And 
the direct path to his worldly goal, be it ever so dirty or 
so dangerous is utilitarian. Untinctured by remorse, 
or love, or honour. It has for its objects money and 
power. And ’tis this path, he consistently pursues. 

He has been travelling skyward fast, and has at last 
distanced his old rival Coke, and soared above him. From 
above, like the hawk, he contemplates his rival of weaker 
wing. His brains have broken down the disparity in law 
—the disparity in age. Coke knows ten times more law. 
Sir Edward is near ten years older. But Sir Francis 
has followed a better course for worldly gain, and has by 
worldly philosophy, by power of wing, beaten him. 

The great Chief Justice has been disgraced. Bacon’s 
triumph is consummated. He has not merely procured 
Coke’s dismissal from office, but has had himself appointed 
expurgator to his Reports. These he himself has declared 
matchless in value, but has also privately informed the 
King that they attack his prerogative. First in indecency, 
first in malice, first in meanness, he is prepared to under¬ 
take the task of their reformation. Some passages are 
purged away. The Reports are destined to be law in 
England. They are Lord Coke’s statements of cases 
that have been adjudged in the law courts, with notes by 

s 2 


388 


coke’s downfall. 


himself. They are to form the law. Bacon, with as much 
criminality as a man who would insert a false statute into 
a code, or pervert the spirit of legislation through its 
letter, procures the perversion of some passages, aimed to 
protect the liberty of the subject. It is, in effect, the 
falsification of the laws. It is true that it is not so abso¬ 
lutely, but it is really. 

He held Coke first in suspense, till the time had grown 
when the harvest was ripe. Now he has him at thorough 
advantage, and strikes. Coke falls. In June is dis¬ 
missed. When term commences, Francis Bacon and the 
Chancellor Egerton (the shaft is no doubt Bacon’s wholly 
and solely, though Egerton’s name is to it, for Ellesmere 
is very old and near death) write to the King and point 
out how the blow may be aggravated. Coke’s place may 
be supplied easily. The business of the King’s Bench by 
the rest of the judges. In the Star Chamber, his voice 
by any other judge that the Chancellor may call—Francis 
Bacon’s to wit. The trials at Nisi Prius by commission. 
The King was inclined to mercy, but Bacon would not 
have it so. James did not desire to lessen his own Pre¬ 
rogative by asking them if Coke shall be turned out or 
no. Besides, Coke has sued for mercy and the King is 
loath to smite. 

In August,* Sir George Villiers, master of the horse 
and K.G., is further made Viscount Villiers. The idea 
was to have made him Lord Whaddon, but his own name 
had the better sound, and Bacon is the happy man to 
send him the intelligence. The patent is sealed on the 
20th. Villiers helps him with the King. Two days after 
* August 12th, 1616. 


THE OVERBURY MURDER. 


389 


Bacon acknowledges some favour granted. In another 
month Bacon will in part repay the obligation, by sealing 
patents of monopoly to his patron. Notwithstanding the 
remonstrance of an entire nation in 1601; notwithstanding 
the then defeat of the crown; notwithstanding a demon¬ 
stration of opinion in parliament more powerful than ever 
had been made before, and a continued unpopularity, mono¬ 
polies are under Sir Francis Bacon's statecraft on the rise. 

A few words may well be spared on the Overbury murder. 
Sir Thomas Overbury, a scholar, a statesman, and a man 
of letters, who has written some songs and descriptions 
of character, which have been deemed worthy to be re¬ 
printed even in our own day, was the friend of Carr, 
Earl of Somerset, the favourite of James I. This Carr 
became violently enamoured of the Countess of Essex, 
wife of the eldest son of Robert Devereux, whose life we 
have traced. Overbury, averse to the liaison, dissuaded 
Carr against it. Opposing it in spite of the king, who 
encouraged it, he was sent to the Tower.* He died in 
confinement the following September of the same year, t 
Lying confined there he was slowly poisoned. The Countess 
of Somerset, late Essex, was the most direct and active in¬ 
strument in his death. But Somerset was implicated ; and 
though it may be doubtful whether sufficient legal evidence 
could be produced against him was no doubt morally guilty. 
Had he been a common personage, doubtless he would have 
found no difficulty in a path to the gallows. The accom¬ 
plices were quickly disposed of. But the trial of a person 
so eminent as the King’s favourite, in possession of 
secrets dangerous to James’s safety, was a different affair. 

* April 21st, 1613. f September 15th, 1613. 


390 


THE KING AND SOMERSET. 


The Countess confessed openly and in court her crimi¬ 
nality. Somerset demanded his trial. Whatever secret 
Somerset held of James in his possession cannot be known. 
It is certain, however, that he was recommended by Bacon, 
acting for the King, to throw himself on the Royal mercy; 
and as it was apprehended, he would charge James 
openly with some crime, men were stationed with cloths 
to throw over his head if he attempted to slander or 
menace his name. Weldon, Harris, and others, assign 
different reasons for the King’s apprehensions. The 
poisoning of James’s eldest son has been suggested. 

During the trial the Monarch paced his rooms in the 
utmost excitement, eagerly inquiring for news, and greatly 
relieved when the intelligence arrived that Somerset had 
not attacked him. Before Somerset had gone to the 
Tower, he had fallen on his neck and slobbered over him, 
bidding him good-bye. But immediately he had left the 
room under arrest, had used terms indicating fear and 
hatred, and a wish that he might never return alive. 
This is Weldon’s testimony. Throwing himself on the 
royal mercy, Carr was liberated, and lived in pensioned 
seclusion for many years. The daughter born of his 
Countess soon after the trial, became afterwards the wife 
of the celebrated Lord William Russell, and the young 
Earl of Essex, from whom she had been divorced, at¬ 
taining subsequently to the rank of leader of the Par¬ 
liamentary army, before Cromwell rose to its head. 

The romance of this episode in the life of Essex; the 
murder of Overbury; the divorce of Essex from his 
young wife; the remarriage with Somerset, form a 
large and not very attractive item of news in James’s 



“ COMMENDAMS ” DISPUTED. 


391 


day, looking dark even in the polluted page of his 
reign. 

Coke stood well for the Chancellorship. This was the 
place Bacon coveted. He had accepted a privy coun- 
cillorship in esse , rather than the Chancellorship in posse; 
for he knew the proverb, “ a bird in the handbut he 
also believed the Chancellorship safe too. If Coke obtained 
it he would be doubly wronged, by his own loss and his 
rival’s gain. Now was the time to strike. Sir Edward 
was in disgrace from his dispute in favour of the King’s 
Bench against the Chancery, “ which is the court of your 
absolute power,” as Bacon had written to the King in 
April 1616. He had, in spite of his place, of his love of 
money, ventured (the question being one of law) to oppose 
Majesty. James considered the privilege and power of 
bestowing livings on his favourites, livings without labour, 
part of his prerogative. Bishops were thus enabled to hold 
several sinecures, as well as their bishoprics. The excuse 
—for when did Satan ever lack one ?—was, that this abuse 
enabled them to maintain hospitality. The poverty of 
the apostles was no temptation to them. The Bishop of 
Winchester hearing that one of the counsel, Serjeant 
Chiborne, in the case of Colt v. Bishop of Lichfield, held 
that such an obligation was not compulsory, and that no 
man is obliged to keep hospitality beyond his means, 
hastened to the King, not with the old cry of the Church 
in danger, but with a much more courtier-like complaint— 
that the prerogative was attacked. The word prerogative 
to James was like a scrap of red cloth to a mad bull. He 
at once called Bacon in. Bacon suggests a letter to the 
judges, staying judgment in the matter till his Majesty 


392 THE JUDGES SUMMONED TO WHITEHALL. 


has signified his pleasure. Mr. Attorney writes the letter 
to Coke in his own hand. Coke requires that all the 
judges be certified in the matter. 

The grand old Chief Justice despised the injunction. 
The law is above the king, for the law made the king. 
The law is my safest helmet, thinks he. This matter 
of prerogative is in nowise touched. Nor was it. The 
case was a civil one between two litigants. The inter¬ 
ference was a gross interference with justice as between 
two private persons. The Chief Justice and his brethren 
proceed to hear and to decide the cause. 

They give their verdict, and then invited the judges to 
write to the King, justifying their decision in law, and 
“ with one consent declare Mr. Attorney Bacon’s letter 
contrary to the law, and such as we could not yield to by 
our oaths.” 

The King inflamed by Bacon and Winchester, and 
mad, as usual, on this matter of prerogative, at once sends 
for the judges to Whitehall, and there called before him, 
summoned as Bacon has advised, upon precedent, they 
are at once admonished by the King. James likes 
their letter neither in matter or manner. The judges 
should have stopped their counsel, Sergeant Chiborne 
when raising impertinent discussions about his preroga¬ 
tive, and by no means have suffered such insolence. He 
proceeded to denounce their conduct, as the bishop pro¬ 
ceeded only in virtue of the royal prerogative. 

The scene is a grand one. There are the twelve 
judges: Edward Coke, Henry Hobart, Lawrence Tan- 
field, Peter Warburton, George Snigge, James Altham, 
Edward Bromley, John Croke, Humphrey Winch, John 






ANOTHER MATTER OF PREROGATIVE. 


393 


Dodderidge, Augustus Nicholls, and Robert Houghton. 
The council, including the Bishop of Winchester, the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, Winwood, Lake, and the 
Chancellor, the Treasurer, the Privy Seal, the Duke of 
Lenox, &c. 

Coke, grey, grizzled, with his peaked beard, ruff, and 
long face is at the head of the refractory judges. James 
is in a towering rage—swelling in the little dignity 
heaven has granted him. The twelve judges in their 
robes of state are on their knees. The old Chan¬ 
cellor Ellesmere, very feeble and weak, stands by. The 
impassive Bacon—wily, serpent-like, with downcast eyes 
and feigned humility — stands, by the right hand of 
the King, and a little in the rear of the Chancellor, 
waiting till he is called on to speak. We will give 
the dialogue as it has descended, the speakers being, 
Lord Coke, the King, and Attorney-General Bacon. 

Coke .—“ The King has desired a stay of justice, a hin¬ 
drance contrary to the law and to the oath of a judge; 
and forasmuch as my brothers here now assembled knew 
that the case did not interfere or impair the King’s pre¬ 
rogative, or fly at such high game, but would have 
hindered justice, they did not think fit to delay. For the 
day was already appointed, and had the day not been 
kept, the suit would have been discontinued, and this 
would have been against both law and justice. And, 
moreover, Mr. Attorney’s letter named no day certain 
for the adjournment, and an adjournment must be always 
to a certain day.” * 

This, with much crabbed Latin, with all his authorities 
* Bacon’s Works, vol. vii., p. 336; Carte, vol. iv., p. 37. 

s 3 


394 ROYAL WISDOM “INFINITE.” 

at length, no doubt delivered my Lord Chief Justice 
Coke. 

The King .—“ My Lord Coke’s answer is mere sophistry. 
The judges could have appointed a day; but this was not 
of such moment: but that they should take upon them¬ 
selves to discern whether the plea did or did not concern 
his prerogative, was monstrous. Of this he alone could 
decide. And if it did not concern his prerogative, they 
should first have proved to him that it did not, and so 
given him assurance that they were not playing with his 
royal power, and touching things above them. As to its 
being against the law and against their oath, the Chief 
Justice has not explained this how or why, and he will 
therefore call upon the Lord Chancellor to settle this 
point.” 

In other words, Is not a King wiser than a judge ? and 
does he not know what belongs to a King’s inscrutable 
wisdom, better than a judge ? 

Ellesmere, who has been sitting down by virtue of his 
age and weakness, rises on the King’s appeal, and begs 
his Majesty to call on Sir Francis Bacon, his Attorney. 

a Sir Francis Bacon .—“ Your Majesty’s royal wisdom 
is infinite, and so is your word: who can gainsay it ? and 
withal the command given in my letter was not superior, 
and being the command of the King was to be obeyed and 
not contradicted by our subject, and my Lord Coke has 
said that it is against the oath of a judge to delay justice ; 
but I would ask him, is it not much more against a 
judge’s oath to proceed as they had done ? for is it not 
part of the judge’s oath to counsel his Majesty when 
they are called ? and if they proceed first to decide and 



BACON ABOVE COKE. 


395 


then to counsel the King on it when the matter is past, 
this is an offence greater than refusing counsel, being 
in defiance of the King.” 

The Lord Chief Justice Coke. —“Mr. Attorney, we 
think you far exceed your authority, for it is the duty 
of counsel to plead before the judges and not against 
them.” 

Sir Francis Bacon .—“ I must be bold to tell the Lord 
Chief Justiee of England, as he styles himself ” (this is a 
thrust at Coke’s pretension to call himself Chief Justice 
of England, instead of merely Chief Justice of the King’s 
Bench, and is not merely aimed at Coke, but is a stroke 
that avails with the King, for the King has been told 
that this title, too, is an arrogation of royal Prerogative, 
that the title alone belongs to the Monarch, who is Lord 
Chief Justice of England)—“ that we, the King’s counsel, 
are obliged, by our oaths and by our offices, to plead not 
only against the greatest subjects, but against any body 
of subjects, be they courts, judges, or even the Commons 
assembled in parliament, who seek to encroach on the 
Prerogative royal. By making this challenge, the judges 
here assembled have highly outraged their character. 
Will your Majesty be pleased to ask the Lord Coke 
what he has to say for himself now, and graciously to 
decide between us?” 

This is the conduct of an ignoble mind, which, confident 
of the protection of a powerful hand, taunts its adversary 
either to say something which may compromise him with 
the monarch, or ventures to insult one whom it would 
otherwise fear. ’Tis the cock in the fable on his filthy 
elevation. 


396 


THE DOG IN AUTHORITY.* 

King. —“ My Attorney-General is right; and I should 
like to know what further can be said in defence of such 
conduct.” 

Chief Justice Coke. —“ It would not become me further 
to argue again with your Majesty.” 

Lord Ellesmere. —“ The law has been well laid down 
by your Majesty’s Attorney-General, and I hope that no 
judge will now refuse to obey your Majesty’s mandate 
issued under the like circumstances. For if the judges con¬ 
sider their oath they will see that they have violated it.” 

Now and hereupon the Chancellor ordered the oath to 
be read. 

The King thereupon took it upon himself to ask each 
of the judges, whether if at any time in any case depend¬ 
ing before them, his Majesty conceived it to concern him 
either in power or projit, and therefore required to con¬ 
sult with them, would they, or would they not, stay 
proceedings. Eleven of the judges declared they would, 
as it was their duty so to do. Hobart among them, the 
Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. We have seen that 
he was described by Bacon as a mild man and a con¬ 
trast to Coke; he now declares that he would always 
trust the justice of the King’s commands. When it comes 
to Coke’s turn, Coke answers, and no nobler answer 
ever was returned by a citizen to a crowned head and an 
all but despotic monarch—that when the case occurs, 

He will do all that becomes a judge. 

For this offence Coke was sequestered from the privy 
council and from the bench, and compelled to beg pardon 

* “ There thou might’st behold the great image of Authority : a dog's 
obeyed in office,” &c .—King Lear, Act 4, sc. 6. 




THE NOBLE ANSTVEK. 


397 


on his knees, precisely as Bacon had suggested. Other pre¬ 
tences were put forward in public, one, that his Reports 
assailed the prerogative. Another, that he had concealed 
knowledge from the King: James throughout having 
closely followed the advice given by Bacon in his letter 
already printed. 

Moreover, throughout this memorable disgrace of a 
rival, Bacon’s had been the hand, that pulled the strings. 
When the law was to be found which would justify the 
arrest of justice, Bacon and his serjeants, Crew and 
Montagu, who had been allied with him in Peacham’s 
case, and Yelverton, the solicitor, another of his allies, 
were the men who discovered it. The mandate issued 
by James rebuking the judges, was so precisely similar 
in language and tone with Bacon’s own, that suspicion 
must attach that he penned the document. The Chan¬ 
cellor was unequal to the task. Bacon was the active 
agent of the trio. The Monarch himself would not have 
dared to indite a legal document, and Bacon’s custom 
was to furnish James with papers written, on which he 
made suggestions and alterations. It matters little, how¬ 
ever, how the document was framed. Its sentiments are 
so purely Bacon’s own, so identical, that even if he did 
not compose it, they are but in extension those already 
recorded. It expressed, that it was a fault in the judges 
that they did not sharply reprove counsel for speaking of 
things appertaining to the King’s Prerogative, “ especially 
since his Majesty hath observed that ever since his coming 
to the crown, the popular sorts of lawyers have been the 
men, that most affrontedly in all parliaments have trodden 
upon his Prerogative; which being most contrary to their 


398 


bacon’s opinion of lawyers. 


vocation, of any men, since the law or lawyers never can 
be respected, if the King be not reverenced, it doth 
therefore best become the judges of any, to check and 
bridle such impudent lawyers, and in their several benches 
to disgrace them that bear so little respect to the king’s 
authority and prerogative. 

Bacon has a private enmity against Coke. He 
has kept it fairly in check—has always behaved with 
temper and discretion till the time for its exhibition was 
ripe. Soon after Bacon had been seized and sent to a 
sponging-house for debt, Coke insulted Bacon openly 
in the Exchequer on the first day of term; Bacon has 
written down the abuse in its precise words. Coke had 
commenced by saying, “If you have any tooth against 
me, Mr. Bacon, pluck it out.” Perhaps he had been 
apprised of Bacon’s underhand attempts to supplant him, 
and the epithet used of him to the Queen. He tells 
Bacon that it were good to clap a capias utlagatum 
upon his back, in allusion to his late arrest, Bacon re¬ 
torting Mr. Attorney, was on an old scent. 

Through all their career, striving against each other, 
the hate has no doubt continued. Bacon has at last his 
revenge. By making his quarrel the King’s, he has pro¬ 
cured Coke’s disgrace. He is even made the instrument 
of his rival’s public rebuke, condemnation, and disgrace. 
He has long studiously misrepresented his acts. Now on 
public grounds, and openly, Sir Edward is reduced. But 
the trials of the Overbury murderers, the Earl and Countess 
of Somerset, are not over, and Coke is required to con¬ 
duct them, so that he is not to be finally disgraced yet; 
Bacon being disinclined (perhaps from a sense of his in- 



MONOPOLIES. 


399 


sufficiency) to the justiceship; and aiming at the Chancel¬ 
lorship, and there being no other judge fit to take the 
post. Bacon objects to Montagu sitting as judge, who 
has so long been only his follower. So the Chief Justice 
is in disgrace till November, when on the first opening 
of term, as we have seen, Bacon urges James to punish 
still further and disgrace him to the uttermost by loss of 
place and fine. The monarch is inclined to be merciful. 
’Tis his head that is weak not his heart, and he is sorry 
even to disgrace his old servant, who has done so little 
to annoy him. But Bacon will have it so, and the King 
consents. By-and-by, James will bitterly repent this con¬ 
cession to private malice, for Captain Coke, of the Long 
Parliament, as the King will call him, will frame a law or 
two, which will put an end to notions of Prerogative for 
ever. But this is yet in the womb of time. 

Coke’s expulsion from office is the sequence of the 
singular enmity which had arisen between these most dis¬ 
tinguished men. From their complete antagonism of 
characters, there was from the first hardly the possibility 
of their agreeing; but since the commencement of their 
career, their rivalry in the same pursuits has of course 
widened the breach. 

The Royal pedant applies to Bacon. What does he 
propose? The reply is prompt. “Not mercy;” and 
to point out how easily the judge’s place may be sup¬ 
plied. On the 13th November he sends to the King 
a form of discharge for my Lord Coke from his place 
of Chief Justice of your Bench. He sends also a war¬ 
rant to be signed by the King, empowering the Chan¬ 
cellor to nominate another Lord Chief Justice. The name 


400 


PACKING THE BENCH. 


is left blank. Bacon suggests his creature Montagu for 
the post, the man who helped him so well in Peacham’s 
case. “If your Majesty, without too much harshness, 
can continue the place within your own servants, it is 
best.” Montagu is one of these. Coventry is not. He is 
a pupil of Coke’s. Coke may try, being condemned for 
matters in his Reports, to gain time. Bacon will have 
prompt measures. The King consents. Here are his 
reasons for his servant’s disgrace : “ His Majesty has noted 
in him a turbulent courage towards the liberties of his 
church and state ecclesiastical, towards his prerogative 
royal, and towards all his other high courts” — the 
Star Chamber, Chancery, Admiralty Court of the Duchy, 
all of them undoubtedly more or less unconstitutional in 
their jurisdiction; and, lastly, that he had given offence 
by his exposition of the law in cases of high treason. 

It has been so usually the case to accept Bacon’s own 
version, on account of its apparent moderation, of Coke’s 
character, that from time immemorial, he has been made 
the subject of condemnation and censure. I am not in¬ 
clined to deny that Coke had much that was unamiable in 
his character. I will go further, and say that if he had been 
conciliatory, we were in poor plight as a nation now. The 
indebtedness of this realm to Coke has never yet been 
defined. It can hardly be overestimated. He was eminently 
acrimonious in manner: he was still popular—not on 
account of his politeness certainly, or his liberality, or his 
good temper. Then why was it? Every fault he had, 
was calculated to lower him in the world’s esteem. All 
his peculiarities were framed to excite animosity and 
ridicule. He was the direct and absolute opposite of 




AIDS TO POPULARITY. 


401 


Bacon in this. Bacon’s eloquence and fascination of 
manner were irresistible. Bacon’s temper was perfectly 
under control. Bacon was always courteous, conciliatory, 
elegant. Coke was a tedious talker, fond of parading 
his law and his learning, irascible and overbearing to his 
counsellors, coarse and vulgar to every poor wretch brought 
before him for trial. That he was popular there is abun¬ 
dant proof. Here, in the King’s letter, announcing his final 
disgrace, is the King’s own declaration. “ His Majesty, in 
his princely wisdom, hath made two special observations of 
him; the one that he having in his nature not one part of 
those things which are popular in men, being neither civil, 
nor affable, nor magnificent, he hath made himself popular, 
by design only, in pulling down government.” Here we 
see that his Master acknowledges him to be popular, and 
cannot account for it. 

Without making any pretence to sagacity, if James 
and his adviser had only discovered one reason, they 
might have ceased to wonder. No one sued to him for 
justice in vain. He was a just judge. Spite of all his 
disagreeableness of manner, his character commanded 
respect and honour, where it neither invited affection nor 
regard. But here is an additional insight into Coke’s 
character:— 

“ Whereas his Majesty might have expected a change 
of him when he made him his own, by taking him to be of 
his council, it made no change at all, but to the worse, he 
holding on all his former channel, and running separate 
courses from the rest of his council, and rather busying 
himself in casting fears before his council, concerning 


402 


CREATURES AND COURTIERS. 


what they could not do, then joining his advice to what 
they should do.” 

What testimony could be more eloquent than this? 
The King gave him a place to make him his creature. 
Creature and courtier are very like. Coke is no more 
manageable. He is even worse than before. And he 
frightens the other creatures by telling them their acts 
were against law. Frightening them with spectres of law 
and hobgoblins of Bracton and Fortescue. That wicked 
old lawyer, damaging the nerves of the obsequious syco¬ 
phants, bent on supporting to the uttermost, the fiction of 
the King’s prerogative. 

Coke falls. Bacon stamps on his prostrate foe. He 
does what he has already done with Essex—makes merry 
over his misery. He cannot publish slander against 
Coke, for Coke is alive to resent it. This he can only do 
by writing and bequeathing his letters to posterity. But he 
can insult his enemy in his fall, and this he does. He pens 
a long letter to Sir Edward of mockery and insult, some 
quotations from which (from its length) can alone be sup¬ 
plied. He commences with that profanity to which he 
was prone in his allusions. 

EXTRACTS FROM BACON’S LETTER TO COKE AFTER 
HIS FALL* 

“ God, therefore, before his Son that bringeth mercy, 
sent his servant, the trumpeter of repentance, to prepare the 
way before him, making it smooth and straight, and as it 

* In Montagu, vol. vii., p. 296, may be read the whole of this letter, 
as revised by Bacon, and at length. 





CHRISTIAN CHARITY IN CHRISTIAN LANGUAGE. 403 


is in spiritual things, where Christ never comes before his 
waymaker, hath laid even the heart with sorrow and repent¬ 
ance, since self-conceited and proud persons think them¬ 
selves too good and too wise to learn of their inferiors, 
and therefore need not the physician. So in the rules of 
earthly wisdom it is not possible for Nature to attain 
any mediocrity of perfection before she be humbled by 
knowing herself and her own ignorance, &c. &c. 

“ Supposing this to be the time of your affliction, that 
which I have propounded to myself is, by taking this sea¬ 
sonable advantage like a true friend, though far unworthy 
to be counted so, to show you your true shape in a glass. 
In discourse you delight to speak too much, not to hear 
others. This is fitter for a pleader than a judge. Your 
affections inclined you to love your own arguments best, 
and reject those of others which your own reason, when 
unprejudiced, knows to be stronger. In law no man 
ordinarily equals you; but when you wander, as you 
often delight to do, you wander indeed. You clog your 
auditory when you most wish to be understood. Speech 
must be either sweet or short. You converse with books, 
not with men. You seldom converse with any but your 
underlings, ever to teach, never to learn. In your 
pleadings you insult over misery, and praise and disgrace 
upon slight grounds, and that sometimes untruly. You 
will jest at any man in public without respect of the per¬ 
son’s dignity or your own. This disgraceth your gravity, 
which, like all your actions, has a touch of vain glory, 
having no respect to the true end. You make the law to 
lean too much to your opinion, whereby you show your¬ 
self to be a legal tyrant, striking with that weapon where 


404 THE SAMARITAN AND THE WOUNDED MAN. 

you please, since you are able to turn the edge any 
way. Your too much love of the world is too much 
seen, when, having the living of a thousand, you relieve 
few or none: the hand that hath taken so much, can it 
give so little ?” 

We who have followed Bacon through his career, who 
have traced it in its nakedness and deformity—we who 
have seen his deep hypocrisy, his scandalous perfidy to his 
friends, and his servile letters; his disparagement of 
noble men, and his utter obsequiousness—must consider 
the effect of such a blow as this, under the pretence and 
mask of friendship, to an utterly ruined and disgraced 
man. No act more malignant in device or execution can 
well be conceived. Not content with pursuing his foe to 
destruction, he would insult him in his misery. The rage, 
the revenge are feline. But what is now printed does 
not contain one tithe of its cruel insult. He proceeds 
to taunt him “ That his tenants in Norfolk are im¬ 
poverished by his means, to revile him for his religion, his 
law, his judicial management, and then to patronize him; 
recommending him to fight, so that he be not utterly 
broken. “ We desire you to give way to power,” says 
Bacon, aping the language and power of royalty. “ You 
cannot but have much of your estate ill got: think how 
much by speaking unjustly , or in unjust causes. Be 
sensible both of the stroke and the hand that striketh. 
Learn of David to leave Shimei and call upon God. To 
humble ourselves, therefore, before God is the part of a 
Christian, ‘ Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito,’ ” 
concluding by much very sound religious and Christian 
advice. 



INSULT UPON INJURY. 


405 


“ In no composition that I have met with,” says one 
of his biographers, “ is there a greater display of vengeful 
malignity. Under pretence of acting a Christian part, he 
pours oil of vitriol into the wounds he had inflicted.” 

I had always looked on Pope’s line— 

“ Wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,” 
as necessarily a concession of truth to epigrammatic smart¬ 
ness. It is hard to say that he was the wisest, brightest, 
but may not a man doubt whether the last attribute, 
“ meanest of mankind,” has not been fairly earned ? 

Among Bacon’s papers printed in Montagu—where, to 
do that intelligent editor justice, they are huddled together 
without order or arrangement—there is a paper printed, 
containing proof of Bacon's handiwork in Coke’s disgrace. 
It is his objections to Coke on public grounds, intended for 
the King; it is marked “ Innovations introduced (by Coke) 
into the laws and government,” and contains precisely 
those charges used by the King in his harangue, condemn¬ 
ing Coke of impairing the jurisdiction of the Royal courts 
of Chancery, Star Chamber, &c. It attacks Coke for dis¬ 
puting the King’s writ in grants of patents and monopolies, 
and for impugning the legality of Benevolences, and, in 
Peacham’s trial, for obstructing the case, in which he 
would have prevailed, “ though it was holpen by the good 
service of others,” for opposing in Cowle’s case, and the 
state prosecutions for treason, arising out of James’s absurd 
notions of prerogative, &c. 

Bacon is now riding on the crest of the wave. Coke is 
disgraced. His rival made out his supersedeas. Francis 
Bacon is the favourite of the King’s favourite. He is a 
privy councillor. He will soon be Lord Chancellor. He 


406 


THE GOAL NEARED. 


has his heel on Coke, and has insulted him to the limits of 
human endurance on the one hand, and malice and hypo¬ 
crisy on the other; it now needs but one step to place 
Bacon’s crown of glory before his eyes—the death of 
Egerton. Then he is first law officer of the crown, and if 
he can be another Wolsey, another Richelieu, Chancellor 
and statesman, King’s favourite and prime minister, that 
were well indeed. 



THE MONPESSON FRAUDS. 


407 


CHAPTER XX. 

We have now to trace the growth of a vast uncon¬ 
stitutional abuse —the grant of monopolies or special 
patents to privileged persons. Bacon the servile, Bacon 
the sycophant, has ingratiated himself with Prince Charles 
as well as Villiers, and has been appointed Chancellor 
of the Duchy of Cornwall. He has already shown his 
usefulness by sealing patents and monopolies to the 
Villiers’ family. These needy adventurers are bent on 
the most scandalous means of personal aggrandisement. 
In all their nefarious schemes of personal enrichment, 
the Lord Keeper has shown himself an active and 
zealous ally. By means of exclusive grants passed under 
the great seal, they have acquired the sole property in 
several lucrative manufactures. They are co-partners in a 
grant to license inns. Villiers is thus indebted to Bacon. 
The latter has given earnest by his past acts that he will, 
when appointed Chancellor, be the servant only of Villiers. 
In November, after Coke is disgraced, there is a letter, 
involved as usual, when mischief is contemplated, sug¬ 
gesting that when a certain case is called on, “ I shall 
fix (when that question cometh to me) to be the justice of 
assize.” This question is no other than one in con¬ 
nection with a Sir Giles Monpesson, who, in partnership 


408 


THE PEOPLE DEFRAUDED. 


with the brother of Villiers, has a patent for making 
gold lace, and also for licensing inns, and levying tolls. 
By this vast sums are falling daily into their exchequer. 
The grant is iniquitous; it is against law; it is against 
reason; yet it enriches the King’s favourite and his rela¬ 
tives, and Bacon will take care to be judge of assize when 
anything concerning it, has to be tried. In other words, 
Bacon will direct the course of justice as the favourite 
requires. How can such servility he repaid but by 
office ? 

Ellesmere, however, still lingers on. He will not sign 
these Monpesson patents, he knows them to be illegal. 
“ Why does he not die ?” thinks Villiers ; “ Bacon would 
be Chancellor, and he would sign.” Villiers is, on New 
Year’s Day, 1617, made Earl of Buckingham: on the 
13th of November preceding, Bacon has set down on 
paper how much he has benefited the future Earl at the 
public expense. The favours conferred by the Lord 
Keeper on his patron are seven in number, and may be 
enumerated in brief. 

1st. He has made the grant of the lands given by the 
king, “ fee farm, and not fee simple, whereby the rent of 
the crown in succession is not diminished, and yet the 
quantity of the land which you have upon your value is 
enlarged.” In other words, Bacon, having to make a 
grant of lands belonging to the King, in trust for his 
people, has, by a clever evasion of the letter of the law, 
given more than was intended, not to the injury of pos¬ 
terity, but to the injury of the people at the time, as so 
much as Villiers gained in rent, they have lost. 

2nd. “ By the help of Sir Lionel Cranfield,” (a man of 



RESIGNATION OF ELLESMERE. 


409 


infamous character, as we shall find by-and-by,) “I ad¬ 
vanced the value of Sherbourn from 26,000/.—it was 
valued at 25,000/. by Somerset—to 32,000/.” This 
appears to have been a surrender; and the crown thus 
was defrauded of 6,000/.; yet Bacon says, “ whereby 
there was 6,000/. gotten, and yet justly.” 

The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh reasons are 
equally iniquitous. But being only explicable by an 
allusion to Villiers's property, and by reference to the 
complications arising therein, need not be quoted. 
Enough is here shown, however, to prove that Villiers 
and Bacon are hand in hand, climbing the hill together. 
Bacon had predicted the Earldom in August, when Sir 
George was made Viscount. Had advised him to depend 
wholly (next unto God) upon the King. Like his “ sainted 
mother,” he is pious, and the advice, albeit Villiers needed 
it not, has fructified. Baron Ellesmere, created Viscount 
Brackley in 1616, has now for some time been bedridden. 
He wrote, many months ago, asking to be permitted to 
resign, but his Majesty would not accept his resignation. 
On the 3rd of March, however, James in person visits 
him at York House, and consents to accept the seals. 
On the 5th Buckingham and Winwood received from his 
hands the great seal. Sir John Egerton, the son, is 
commanded by his father from his bed to produce it, and 
in its silken bag it is delivered to them, and by them 
conveyed to James. On the 7th it is formally delivered 
to Bacon, between the hours of eleven and twelve^ at 
Whitehall. This is Villiers’s work : Villiers wants those 
patents sealed. It is true that Ellesmere is not dead, but 
will die in some nine days, being past hope; but Bacon 

T 


410 


IMPULSIVE GRATITUDE. 


is chosen, lifted from the Attorneyship : (Coke was dis¬ 
graced in time), and this was Villiers’s doing. 

Bacon hastens home, his heart filled with exaltation. 
Its proud throbbings, its ambitious longings, for the instant 
stilled, by joy and delight. He is at last Lord Keeper. 
He, the friendless, the poor, the indebted. He, the strug¬ 
gling genius, the man conscious of great gifts, who has 
bent all his intellect to this wish. Who has stooped as 
no man ever stooped before. He who has walked through 
miry ways these many long years; who has sounded all the 
depths and shoals of courtiership, is at last Lord Keeper. 
Full of gratitude, he gives way for once in his life to an 
impulse, and sits down and writes even affectionately. 

“ My dearest Lord,—* 

“It is both in cares and kindness that small ones 
float up to the tongue, and great ones sink down into the 
heart in silence. Therefore I could speak little to your 
lordship to-day, neither had I fit time. But I must pro¬ 
fess thus much, that in this day’s work you are the truest 
and perfectest mirror and example of firm and generous 
friendship that ever was in court. And I shall count every 
day lost, wherein I shall not either study your well-doing 
in thought, or do your name honour in speech, or perform 
you service in deed. Good, my Lord, account and accept 
me, 

“ Your most bounden and devoted friend 

and servant of all men living, 

“ March 7, 1616-17. “Francis Bacon, C.S.” 

Gustos sigillarum, Keeper of the great seal of England, 
first law officer of the crown, first peer of the realm, 
speaker of the Upper House by prescription. We can see 
* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 241. 



PERVERSION OF JUSTICE. 


411 


Francis Bacon’s pale face glow, as with enthusiasm ting¬ 
ling through his cold frame, he vents his excitement in 
this letter; it is no fancy, it is mere fact—that in the 
sentence “ that in this day’s work,” there is a gallop 
foreign to Bacon’s style, as if penned in haste and under 
emotion. No such sentence exists again in all his writing. 
He is for ever bondman to Yilliers for his friendship. 
“ Accept me as your most bounden and devoted friend.” 
“ Most bounden !” The phrase has an awkward omen. 
This is the very protestation of indebtedness to Essex, 
at the time he is, as it is reported, slandering him to 
the Queen. He declared himself most bounden while 
the shadow of the headsman fell on the paper as he 
wrote. 

“ Most bounden !” I am not superstitious, yet I would 
rather any word than that, my good Lord Keeper. And 
sure enough we, who can be oracular now the thing is over, 
being the surest prophets, know that within six months 
this “most bounden and devoted friend” will, for his own 
ends, thinking the time has come, attempt to overthrow 
Villiers with the King. Traduce him behind his back, and, 
foiled in the attempt, be driven to hole ignominiously, and 
be thenceforward treated with the contempt and contumely 
he deserves. 

Francis Bacon is now Lord Keeper. He has been 
elected as the servant of Villiers. Flis tenure is a base 
servitude. And of this unluckily but too many proofs 
exist. 

From the day that Bacon was nominated in his office, 
nay, so indecent is the haste, before—Villiers appears in 
a new office, Bacon in a more degrading aspect. The 

T 2 


412 


THE CHANCELLOR A MERE LACKEY. 


favourite directs the decisions of the Court. Bacon is a 
mere image of equity. An object to put on the bench, 
to lend weight and dignity and a form to its decisions. 
Villiers is the judge. Villiers settles the decrees. Bacon 
is to have no will, no thought, of his own. Buckingham 
will settle who shall or who shall not gain suits, the amount 
of costs, the mode and manners of procedure. Bacon will 
vindicate his right to private judgment, by taking fees in 
consonance with Villiers’ directions. Bound by every tie 
human and divine to administer justice, the new judge 
merely administers it—to the enrichment of his patron. 
Bacon takes his place for the first time on the 8th of 
May. On the 6th, two days before the ceremony of 
installation is consummated, Buckingham writes: 44 That 
Sir Lewis Tresham hath a suit depending in the Chancery 
before your lordship; and therefore, out of my love and 
respect toward him, I have thought fit to recommend him 
unto your favour, so far only as may stand with justice 
and equity. ... I further desire your Lordship to 
give him what expedition you can, that he may receive 
no prejudice by his journey.” 

This is a feature as new in the annals of justice as 
torture or bribery. The Chancellor has sold himself to 
the King’s minion. It is true his place is gained, not by 
merit, but as a gift from a royal favourite; a precedent 
which will stand Bacon in bad stead yet, so peculiarly 
is crime oft its ow r n particular retribution. He is 
therefore bound hand and foot to Villiers. Perchance 
the bondage is irksome. But he winces and submits. 
By-and-by, he hopes to have Villiers thrown, like Coke, 
and then he will carry it with as high a hand. 



BUT A KING IN OFFICE. 


413 


James goes in March on a visit to Scotland, and will not 
return for some months. The new Lord Keeper plays 
monarch at Whitehall. He is the King’s representative 
in his absence. Gives audience, seals writs, hears peti¬ 
tions, dismisses suppliants. He is as high as ever was 
Chancellor or Chief Justice before. He writes glowingly 
that he has drawn all the lawyers dry, answered every 
petition. “ And this, I think, could not be said in our 
age before. This I speak, not out of ostentation, hut out 
of gladness when I have done my duty. I.know men 
think, I cannot continue if I should thus oppress myself 
with business; but that account is made.” Good and 
noble servant of the commonwealth ! Modesty is a rare 
plant, which thou possessest to the full! 

On the 11th of June, Buckingham is interceding again, 
this time for Sir Robert Taunton. Bacon is on the top¬ 
most pinnacle of fame and grandeur as deputy King; but 
even now he is in the toils, and the arch is crumbling, and 
the axe is at the root, as we shall see. 

A brother of the Earl of Buckingham has taken it into 
his unhappy head to fall in love with Coke’s only daughter, 
or with her fortune. She is one of the richest heiresses 
in England. Sir Edward is a warm man, but his wife, 
Lady Hatton, has two fortunes in her own right, so that, 
if this Villiers wins her, his family will have what they 
particularly lack, money, equal to the best in the realm. 
The disgraced Chief Justice is not indisposed to the match. 
Lady Hatton, the termagant, however, hating everything 
that her spouse likes, has determined that if he will have 
Villiers for a son-in-law, she will not. Her husband is 
bent on power, on revenge, and will sell his daughter, 


414 


SIR EDWARD COKERS DAUGHTER. 


though he hates the man. Alas! he too is thonging 
the scourge for his own back. He will find retribution 
in a daughter’s lasting misery and shame. In scorn, 
and contempt heaped to the full. In her disgrace traced 
with burning style upon his heart, where he is most mortal, 
for (like Shylock) he loves his daughter, next after the 
law and his money bags. He is, in truth, a superior 
Shylock, great on the letter of the law. But Shylock is 
a timid, and he is a bold man. When his gray hairs 
should command honour, his hearth will be desolate, and 
he will find his daughter a mock and a scorn, and he 
but a sign and a jest in the world’s mouth, on her account. 

Villiers long since set his eye on the lady. For some 
time her father discountenanced the step, but he is now 
in disgrace. And it has been arranged that if this 
match takes place, the weak and plastic King shall be 
moulded into new form, and receive Coke again into 
favour. The bargain is hard, but the case is desperate. 
Men think that Coke’s first refusal, helped to lose him his 
place. He hates the greedy crew of Villiers ; but place, 
and honour, and power are dear to him as life. His old 
foe still pursues him vindictively, hopes to bring him 
before the Star Chamber, and is superintending anxiously 
and personally the expurgation of his Reports, on the 
frivolous plea that they contain treasonable and seditious 
doctrines. He has heard that Lady Hatton dislikes the 
marriage; he therefore writes to her to plot with her 
against her husband, promising to abet her in her re¬ 
sistance. This is only another blow at his rival, but 
unluckily this will recoil. 

The new Lord Keeper “ dressed in a little brief 




HER ABDUCTION. 


415 


authority,” has been this month past playing such fantastic 
tricks as only a man his equal in meanness could. He 
has outraged and insulted his colleague, Winwood, the 
Secretary of State, by assuming entire mastery and rule. 
Confident in James’s favour, he fancies himself all but 
King. Winwood suggests to Coke that, by marrying his 
daughter to Yilliers, he may again recover the wind of 
this popinjay Chancellor. Sir Edward arranges wfith 
Yilliers concerning the match. Lady Hatton, who in 
June of the preceding year stood up stoutly for her lord 
when he was condemned, even going so far as to quarrel 
with the Queen on his account, is now enraged beyond 
measure that Coke should proceed in such a step without 
her sanction. Sir Edward is in the habit of going to bed 
at nine, and rising at four to labour. After he is in bed 
Lady Hatton, impulsive and passionate as usual, takes 
her daughter Frances with her, and quits the house in 
Holborn, where they reside. They take coach, and, 
riding all night, early in the morning reach Oatlands, 
where a cousin of Lady Hatton’s, Sir Edward Withipole, 
lives. There they hope to conceal themselves. 

Lady Hatton, the instrument of her own passion, not 
merely content with prejudicing her daughter against 
Villiers, offers her hand to the Earl of Oxford, and shows 
her a forged letter, as if sent by that nobleman, declar¬ 
ing his love. 

In the latter end of June, Coke applied for a warrant 
to the privy council, to recover his daughter, whose re¬ 
treat he had discovered. Bacon threw obstacles in the 
way; and, as Sir Edward found redress hopeless with his 
old enemy’s opposition, resolved, having first obtained a 


416 


HER RESCUE. 


warrant from the Secretary of State (Winwood), to proceed 
further with his usual directness of purpose and energy. 

At this point I am in a difficulty. I find two distinct 
original accounts of Coke’s procedure. As one impeaches 
the Chief Justice’s character for consistency, and as a 
“ Guardian of the Law,” it becomes material that the 
correct statement should be adhered to. Lord Campbell, 
in his life of Coke, describes the abduction of Coke’s 
daughter as being made at ten at night, from Hatton 
House, Holborn. “ They [Lady Llatton and her daughter] 
entered a coach, which was waiting for them at a little 
distance, and, travelling by unfrequented and circuitous 
roads, next morning they arrived at a house of the Earl 
of Argyle at Oatlands, then rented by Sir Edward Withi- 
pole, their cousin. There they were shut up, in the hope 
that there could be no trace of the place of their conceal¬ 
ment. 

“ Meanwhile Sir Edward Coke, having ascertained the 
retreat of the fugitives, applied to the Privy Council for a 
warrant to search for his daughter ; and, as there was 
some difficulty in obtaining it, he resolved to take the law 
into his own hand.” 

This statement of Lord Campbell’s we see is inaccurate 
in one respect: Sir Edward was armed with Winwood’s 
warrant, and therefore did not “take the law into his 
own hands,” though he may have exceeded his warrant. 

Lord Campbell proceeds : “ Accordingly the ex-Chief 
Justice of England mustered a band of armed men, con¬ 
sisting of his sons, his dependents, and his servants; and 
himself putting on a breastplate, with a sword by his side, 
and pistols at his saddle-bow, he marched at their head 





THE UNVARNISHED ACCOUNT. 


417 


upon Oatlands. When they arrived there they found the 
gate leading to the house bolted and barricaded. This 
they forced open without difficulty : but the outer door of 
the house was so secured as long to defy all their efforts 
to gain admission. The ex-Chief Justice repeatedly 
demanded his child in the king’s name, and laid down 
for law, that “ if death should ensue it would be justifi¬ 
able homicide in him, but murder in those who opposed 
him.” One of the party gaining entrance by a win¬ 
dow, let in all the rest; but still there were several 
other doors to be broken open. At last Sir Edward 
found the objects of his pursuit secreted in a small closet, 
and, without stopping to parley, lest there should be a 
rescue, he seized his daughter, tore her from her mother, 
and, placing her behind her brother, rode off with her to 
his house at Stoke Pogis, in Buckinghamshire. There he 
secured her in an upper chamber of which he himself kept 
the key. 

This narrative is so circumstantial that it is difficult to 
believe it imaginary and false. Yet it scarcely accords in 
any particular with Chamberlain’s account, written at the 
time. In one respect as we have seen, it is absolutely 
incorrect. Impugning as it does Sir Edward’s justice and 
character; for it would be monstrous that a judge should 
act in so violent and unlawful a manner—the subject 
needs elucidation.* In the ‘Biographia Britannica’ the 
tale is told somewhat similarly, but much more briefly, 
and refers to some letters of James West, Esq., for cor- 

* For this purpose I communicated with his lordship; but in the 
absence of a satisfactory reply, I am constrained to suppose Lord Camp¬ 
bell’s account imaginative and incorrect. 

T 3 


418 


THE MOST PROBABLE FACTS. 


roboration. Unless the late Chancellor, therefore, had 
the use of these, it is difficult to understand how he could 
have obtained so explicit #nd withal so inaccurate an 
account. 

Chamberlain’s version is much more simple. It is 
this:— 

“ The daughter was first carried away to the Lady 
Withipole’s, from thence 'privily to a house of the Lord of 
Argyles, by Hampton Court , whence her father , by a 
warrant from Mr. Secretary, fetched her; but, indeed, 
went further than his warrant, and brake open divers 
doors before he got her. His lady was at his heels, and, 
if her coach had not held in the pursuit after him, there 
was like to be strange tragedies. He delivered his 
daughter to the Lady Compton, Sir John’s mother; but 
the next day Edmondes, clerk of the council, was sent 
with a warrant to have the custody of her at his own 
house. 

“ The Lord Coke and his lady hath great wars at the 
council table. I was there on Wednesday, but by rea¬ 
son of the Lord Keeper’s absence there was nothing 
done. What passed yesterday I know not yet; but the 
first time she came accompanied with the Lord Burleigh 
and his lady, the Lord Danvers, the Lord Denny, Sir 
Thomas Howard and his lady, with I know not how 
many more, and declaimed bitterly against him, and so 
carried herself that divers said Burbage * could not have 
acted better. Indeed, it seems he (Sir Edward) hath 
carried himself very simply, to say no more, in divers 
matters ; and no doubt he shall be sifted thoroughly, for 
* The great aetor. 






COURT GOSSIP OF THE DAY. 


419 


the King is much incensed against him, and by his own 
weakness he hath lost those few friends he had. 

“ The next day being all convened before the council, 
she (Frances the daughter) was sequestered to Mr. Attor¬ 
ney, and yesterday, upon a palliated agreement twixt Sir 
Edward Coke and his lady, she was sent to Hatton 
House, with order that the Lady Compton should have 
access to win her and wear her. 

“ It were a long story to tell all the passages of this 
business, which hath furnished Paul’s, and this town very 
plentifully the whole week. The Lord Coke was in great 
danger to be committed for disobeying the council’s order, 
for abusing his warrant, and for the violence used in 
breaking open the doors; to all which he gave reason¬ 
able answers; and for the violence, will justify it by law, 
though orders be given to prefer a bill against him in the 
Star Chamber. He and his friends complain of hard 
measure from some of the greatest at that Board, and 
that he was too much trampled upon with ill language. 
x\nd our friend (Winwood ?) passed not scot free from 
the warrant, which the greatest there (Bacon) said was 
subject to a 'prcemunire , and, withal, told the Lady 
Compton that they wished well to her and her sons, and 
would be ready to serve the Earl of Buckingham with all 
true affection, whereas others did it out of faction and 
ambition.* About three weeks after | the same corre¬ 
spondent writes again: That the daughter is staying with 
Sir Robert Coke, Sir Edward’s son by his first wife, and 
that Lady Hatton is with her all day, to prevent the 

* John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, July 17,1617. 
f August 9th. 



420 FIRST INKLING OF BACON’S INJUSTICE. 


access of others. That, finding her friends are deserting 
her, and that “ she struggles in vain” against the king’s 
will “she begins to come about,” and “ upon some condi¬ 
tions will double her husband’s portion and make up the 
match and will give it her blessing.” . . . “But it seems 
the Lady Hatton would have all the honour and thanks, 
and so defeat her husband’s purposes, towards whom, of 
late, she has carried herself very strangely, and, indeed, 
neither like a wife nor a wise woman.” 

From the temper of this letter, it will seem the writer 
bears no ill-will to Bacon. Yet in this very missive we 
have evidence of Bacon’s conduct on the bench since he 
has acted as judge. As it has been alleged that Bacon’s 
downfall was the result of a conspiracy—a supposition 
that only the utmost stretch of ignorance could have con¬ 
ceived, or believe—it will be well to insert the writer’s 
opinion of Bacon, only some three months since he has 
been actively engaged in his new career. 

“ The Lord Keeper hath been this fortnight at 
Gorhambury, and means to continue there a fortnight or 
three weeks longer. 

“ The world begins already to complain of some en¬ 
croaching courses , and say , if things should thus proceed 
and hold on, that we should have , as it were, all men's 
estates ‘ in scrinio pictoris .’ The distaste continues still 
twixt him and ‘ the boisterous secretary ’ (Winwood), as 
he terms him, though some friends have meditated a re¬ 
conciliation. But, at the worst the world is of opinion, 
that if they should come to jostle, both of them are made 
of as brittle metal the one as the other.” 

Meanwhile Lady Hatton applies to Bacon for redress. 





THE ADVICE OF AN ENEMY. 


421 


Bacon, eager to punish his adversary, issues a warrant 
to sue Coke in the King’s name into the Star Chamber. 
Coke is not afraid to defend himself, but has sufficient 
knowledge of law to desire to keep out of its toils. Bacon, 
eager to overthrow the whole project, and pushing his zeal 
to an indiscreet extent, writes to Buckingham, to inform 
him of the project, and to advise him against it. He had 
written to Buckingham on the 8th June, and Buckingham 
having been apprised of his dealing, writes early in July, 
on the 5th, a business letter, somewhat cooler than those 
which have preceded it, to his agent and instrument, the 
Lord Keeper. For once the courtiers zeal is overrunning 
his discretion ; his hate blinds him. He sees no danger 
in Villiers’ letter; yet rightly construed, its bated 
courtesy is an evil omen. It is curt—almost uncivil, 
when even a word or a phrase might portend ruin. Heed¬ 
less, however, Bacon will thrust advice on the favourite. 
Older and wiser he will warn him. So on the 12th of July 
writes that “ Secretary Winwood has busied himself with 
a match between Sir John Villiers and Sir Edward Coke’s 
daughter, rather to make a faction than out of any good 
affection to your lordship. The lady’s consent is not gained, 
nor her mother's, from whom she expecteth a great fortune .” 

“This match, out of my faith and freedom to your lord- 
ship, I hold very inconvenient, both for your mother, 
brother, and yourself. 

“ First. He shall marry into a disgraced house, which, 
in reason of state, is never held good. 

“ Next. He shall marry into a troubled house of man 
and wife, which, in religion and Christian discretion, is 
not liked. 



422 


HATE AS BLIND AS LOVE. 


“ Thirdly. Your lordship will go near to lose all such 
of your friends as are adverse to Sir Edward Coke 
(myself only except, who, out of a pure love and thank¬ 
fulness, shall ever be firm to you).” 

Oh, how the Lord Keeper is overreaching himself! A 
little three months ago, no man in the realm was so 
humble, so servile, so grateful for service. Already, three 
months of the air of a palace has turned his brain. Like 
a too eager player, he must strike more than home. He 
dares, in his hate of Coke, to cross Villiers and the King, 
trusting to his own subtlety to bear him through. 

“And lastly and chiefly, believe it. It will greatly 
weaken and distract the King’s service; for though in regard 
of the King’s great wisdom and depth, I am persuaded those 
things will not follow which they imagine; yet opinion 
will do a great deal of harm and cast the King back, and 
make him relapse into those inconveniences which are 
now well on to be recovered.” 

Surely the Lord Keeper, in his great zeal for his master’s 
service, overcalculates the danger of this match. It is 
hardly likely to convulse the realm. Who cares, except 
the scandalmongers, whether Villiers or Oxford marries 
Frances Coke ? Coke is not so unpopular; but Bacon’s 
zeal and love to the King make him blind. 

“ Therefore my advice is, and your lordship shall do 
yourself a great deal of honour, if, according to religion 
and the law of God, your lordship will signify unto my 
lady, your mother, that your desire is that the marriage 
be not pressed or proceeded in without the consent of both 
parents, and so either break it altogether, or defer any 
further delay in it till your lordship’s return: and this 







A WISE COMPLAISANCE. 


423 


the rather for that (besides the inconvenience of the 
matter itself) it hath been carried so harshly and incon¬ 
siderately by Secretary Winwood, as for doubt, that the 
father should take away the maiden by force; the 
mother, to get the start, hath conveyed her away secretly, 
which is ill of all sides. 

“ Thus hoping your lordship will not only accept well, 
but believe my faithful advice, who, by my great ex¬ 
perience in the world, must needs see further than your 
lordship can.” 

This very night, perhaps, of the 12th, Coke is carrying 
away his daughter. His letter of three days later reaches 
the King in Scotland, near upon the same time. 

On the 25th Bacon writes to the King.* He com¬ 
mences with his usual protestations, “ feeling myself more 
bound than other men in doing your commandments, 
when your resolution is made known to meand 
then proceeds to the disparagement of Coke. “ If 
there be any merit in drawing on this match, your 
Majesty would bestow thanks, not upon the zeal of Sir 
Edward Coke to serve your Majesty, nor upon the 
eloquent persuasions or pragmaticals of Mr. Secretary 
Winwood, but upon them, (meaning myself,) that, carry¬ 
ing your commandments and directions with strength and 
justice, in the matter of the Governor of Dieppe, in 
the matter of Sir Robert Rich, and in the matter of 
protecting the lady, according to your Majesty’s com¬ 
mandment, have so humbled Sir Edward Coke, as he 
seeketh now that with submission which (as your Majesty 
knoweth) before he rejected with scorn; for this is the 
* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 247. 


424 


FRIENDY DISPARAGEMENT. 


true motive that hath persuaded this business, as I doubt 
not but your Majesty, in your excellent wisdom, doth 
easily discern.” 

This is to be well interpreted. He then proceeds to pro¬ 
test that this is not said out of fear of Coke, who, as his 
Majesty knows, for Bacon had ofttimes complained to 
the King, did override him when he was plain Mr. 
Bacon ; because now the King hath placed him so near his 
chair, he fears him no longer. But if his Majesty will 
have the match proceed, he would like to be informed of 
such wish, and will further it (even though it is against 
his enemy), “ imagining with myself, though I will not 
w T ager on women’s minds, that I can prevail more with 
the mother than any other man.” 

So, so, Sir Francis Bacon, although she would not w r ed me, 
although Coke is my enemy, yet have I so established 
myself at his hearth, that I can prevail with his wife 
more than any other man! Is this mere conceit, or a 
happy manner and a glib tongue, or because, knowing 
I hate Sir Edward, she will join with me in plaguing 
him ? In this phrase, and in one or two other of similar 


kinds spread up and down Bacon’s works, we perceive 
that, like Iago, he had but a poor opinion of the 
sex. 

Next he tries to insert the small end of the wedge 
’twixt the King and Buckingham. If he could only be 
taken into confidence in place of this man; then, by 
judicious slander, well distributed, Fie might—but, tush, 
this is no time to disclose plans. 

“ For if I should be requested in it by my Lord of 
Buckingham, the answers of a true friend ought to be, 




A NEW PARLIAMENT. 


42-3 


That I had rather go against his mind than against his 
good: but your Majesty I must obey: and besides, I 
shall conceive that your Majesty, out of your great 
wisdom and depth, doth see those things which I see hot.” 

Bacon already fears Coke, in spite of his statement to 
the contrary, nay, that is a proof rather, proceeding to 
declare that the state (thanks to his labours) is not only 
in good quiet and obedience, but in good affection and 
disposition; that his Majesty’s prerogative has risen 
some degrees higher than before ; that the judges are in 
good temper; that the justices of peace, who are the 
gentlemen of England, grow to be loving and obsequious ; 
and that, in consequence of Coke’s being cut down, “ all 
mutinous spirits grow to be a little poor, and to draw 
in their horns.” But let the King note this, if there 
be a belief encouraged of his again coming into place, 
with the strength of such an alliance at his back, “ it will 
give a turn and relapse in men’s minds into the former 
state of disaffection, to the great weakening of your 
Majesty’s service.” 

The keen enemy having flattered and frightened the 
King, having talked of his prerogative, and so aimed and 
struck all the vulnerable parts of the poor Pedant’s 
carcase, recommends a Parliament. 

In Parliament, Bacon shines. His diplomacy, tact, 
eloquence, discrimination, make him great there. But his 
advice is “ conditionalfor it depends on his Majesty’s 
council being united, which can never be expected “ if 
that man (Coke) come in.” Not because I dislike him, 
certainly not, “ but because he is by nature unsociable, by 
habit popular, and too old now to take a new ply. 


426 


THE KING’S REBUKE. 


And men begin already to collect, yea, and conclude, 
that he that raiseth such a smoke to get in, will set all 
on fire when he is in.” 

So Coke, with his old pertinacity, w r ith his old pugnacity, 
when fairly roused, to directness of purpose, is moving 
heaven and earth to get in again. Doubtless he will be 
even with Bacon yet. He despises that wily, astute poli¬ 
tician, that supef-subtle Venetian mind, worthy of the 
best days of Florentine diplomacy. Lacking only, 
through unkind Providence, one requisite—physical 
courage—the grip,—to be the most dangerous man that 
ever lived amid the tide of time, or breasted the waves 
of a stormy political life. Coke will have at him. 

On the same day he writes to Buckingham, to feel his 
pulse as to his last letter—still unanswered—and about 
which he begins to have a little trepidation. Buck¬ 
ingham, for the present, is, however, silent; but James 
has answered him, though the letter unluckily is not 
preserved. James is somewhat wrath that he should 
have presumed to meddle in such an affair; is vexed at 
his carriage towards his colleague Winwood; has heard 
of his haughty language at the council table, in which 
he threatened his fellow ruler with the penalties of a 
praemunire, “ confiscation of goods, and imprisonment 
during the King’s pleasure,” for granting the warrant to 
Coke, against his wish, behaving himself with an inso¬ 
lence and majesty that have made the subject a common 
scandal.* Besides, James has now set his heart on this 
match, Steenie himself having decided that it must be. 
He knows Coke is a disagreeable old dog, but he has 
* See Chamberlain’s letter. 



his servant’s answer. 


427 


sufficient virtue to honour a just judge, and spite of 
Coke’s being no friend of his, cannot help admiring him, 
the irate, vexatious, honest old Chief Justice. 

James’s letter is a long, and withal friendly one, but 
still couched in terms of rebuke. Bacon’s answer, penned 
promptly on its receipt, is probably written about the 1st of 
August: in Montagu it is dated on the 25th of July, as 
was the later letter herein given, which is clearly im¬ 
possible : they could not have been written on the same 
day. 

“ May it please your most excellent Majesty,— 

“ I do very much thank your Majesty for your letter, 
and think myself much honoured by it. For though it 
contain some matter of dislike—in which respect it hath 
grieved me more than any event which hath fallen out in 
my life—yet, because I know reprehensions from the best 
masters to the best servants are necessary, and that no 
chastisement is pleasant for the time, but yet worketh 
good effects, and for that I find intermixed some passages 
of trust and grace ; and find also in myself inwardly, 
sincerity of intention and conformity of will, howsoever 
I may have erred; I do not a little comfort myself, 
resting upon your Majesty’s accustomed favour, and 
most humbly desiring that any one of my particular 
notions may be expounded by the constant and direct 
course which, your Majesty knoweth, I have ever held 
in your service.” 

The King has said this match is multum in parvo. 
Bacon knowing that the most insidious flattery is imita¬ 
tion, with his usual felicity seizes on the phrase and uses 
it again. 

“ I do acknowledge that this match is multum in parvo 
in both senses that your Majesty speaketh. But your 
Majesty perceiveth well that I took it to be in a farther 


428 


FALSE AND FATAL DIPLOMACY. 


degree, magno in parvo, in respect of your service. But 
since your Majesty biddeth me to confide upon your act 
of empire, I have done. For as the Scripture saith, 4 To 
God all things are possible ;’ so, certainly, to wise kings, 
much is possible .” 

This comparison of James with God, is this Bacon’s own 
thought or the King’s ? is Bacon answerable for it in that 
speech of 1610? is this only another wile of flattery? It 
is, however, James’s weakest point. 

Having ventured on this stroke, laid on the colour 
deeply—the amount of light will bear a little shadow, the 
writer is an accomplished artist and will waste no pigment— 
he tries a shaft at Buckingham. This man Buckingham, 
who was he, but a younger son of a poor baronet, a mere 
boy, a Boderigo? So an insidious dart is hurled, not 
fiercely or maliciously, but wisely, with just sufficient 
depreciation not to startle the person to whom it is im¬ 
parted, and yet with enough malice, to do his good and 
devoted friend, who has shown himself the best friend to 
Bacon ever man had,* an injury. 

“ Now for the manner of my affection to my Lord of 
Buckingham, for whom I would spend my life, and that 
which is to me more, the cares of my life; I must humbly 
confess that it was in this a little parent-like, but in 
truth without any disesteem of his lordship’s discretion ; 
for I know him to be naturally a wise man, of a sound 
and staid wit, as I have ever said unto your Majesty. 
And again, I know he hath the best tutor in Europe. 
But yet I was afraid that the height of his fortune might 
make him too secure ; and as the proverb is, a looker 
sometimes seeth more than a gamester.” 

* The letter of Bacon’s, March 7, 1616. 





MORE AFFECTION FOR THE KING. 


429 


How obliged Villiers must be for Bacon’s good word with 
their Master. So Francis Bacon did think, has thought, 
overcalculating his own powers, that his praise of Villiers 
has had weight with James. Here lies the secret of 
this fatal mistake. His hatred of Coke has a little 
blinded him, but his belief that he is stronger than 
Villiers has blinded him much mor^ Bacon thinks, 
naturally perhaps, that his genius is of more value to 
the King, his power as an historian, his knowledge as a 
statesman, than Villiers’ services, who has no wonderful 
wit, and cannot praise James either in verse or prose. 
Bacon is for the instant oblivious, that the world is ruled 
not by reason, but by its passions. By its affections, pre¬ 
judices, and sympathies rather than true philosophy. He 
is not so ruled, and forgets that others are not as wise. 

The next paragraph has allusion to a service which 
Buckingham has recently done for Bacon. Bacon re¬ 
commended a certain Mr. Lowden to be Baron of the 
Exchequer in Ireland. Nay, he did more; in his full¬ 
blown pride, presuming the thing done, he having so 
determined it, he has given the place to him. Lowden 
has been the Queen’s solicitor. Is not a very wise judge. 
Even Bacon cannot recommend him. Perhaps it is only 
a money fee that binds him to the man’s service. But 
James was somewhat incensed, first that the man should 
have been appointed without consulting him; next, that 
he should have been sent down to pester him in Scotland, 
to complete the appointment so confidently promised by 
Bacon without any sufficient grounds for the unusual 
license. James, with the warmth of heart which he had 
inherited from his poor and unhappy mother, has alluded 


430 


THE MONARCH AROUSED. 


in his letter, to Villiers having palliated his (Bacon’s) 
blunder, and made up in friendship for the indiscretion 
of the act. Bacon now acknowledges the service, and 
thanks James and the Earl, finishing with this remark¬ 
able sentence: “For I am not so ignorant of my,own 
case, but that I know I am come in with as strong 
an envy of some particulars, as with the love of the 
general.” 

The rest of this long letter may be briefly summed up 
as containing ; first, an excuse for his demeanour to Coke 
and Win wood at the council table; for his haughty 
behaviour, acknowledging, “ I was sometimes sharp, it 
may be too much, but it was with end to have your 
Majesty’s will performedand that he was not aware 
he was more forward in attempting to punish Sir Edward 
Coke for the riot he had committed than the other lords 
of the council. 

The King in his letter considered the allusion to Sir 
Edward Coke, in Bacon’s last, rather depreciating to that 
judge. It is true Bacon is now above him, but it is his, 
the King’s, hand which placed him there, so he keenly re¬ 
torts on him the epithet, “ Mr, Bacon.” Bacon now declares 
that he did not use the word to show the difference in 
their present as contrasted with their past fortunes. 
“For I thank God I was never vindictive nor impla 
cable.” James has thought it unmeet that he should be 
plotting with his adversary’s wife to overthrow him ; “ this 
is to be in league with Delilah.” Bacon explains that 
it was his interest in her, but chiefly that he in judgment 
coincided with the steps she took; only as the result of 
passion, that moved him; and then with the most pro- 



James’s discrimination. 


431 


found obeisance, with the old prayer to his Majesty to 
maintain him in grace and favour, which is the fruit 
of my life, upon the root of a good conscience, he 
concludes. 

This letter, coming on further reports of his behaviour 
towards Coke, though he has changed it a good deal 
since he has found how the wind blows, angers the 
King. His heart touched where it is most vulnerable, in 
the matter of Buckingham, he fires up swiftly at this 
depreciation of his favourite. He writes back swiftly from 
Nantwich in Cheshire, as he returns home from Scotland, 
not even delaying till he can see him. 

He considers, in the first place, “ the stealing away by 
the mother of the daughter, not Coke’s recovery, the 
crime. For her recovery was upon lawful warrant signed 
by Winwood ; for regardless of the violence already com¬ 
mitted, and except a father be an idiot or lunatic, James 
never read of any law to prevent a father recovering his 
own child.” 

Our next observation is, “ That whereas you protest 
your affection to Buckingham, and thereafter confess that 
it is in some sort parent-like ; yet after you have praised 
his natural parts, we will not say that you throw all down 
by a direct imputation upon him; but we are sure you 
do not deny to have had a greater jealousy of his dis¬ 
cretion, than so far as we conceived he ever deserved at 
your or at any man’s hands. For you say that you were 
afraid that the height of his fortune might make him too 
secure, and so, as a looker-on, you might sometimes see 
more than a gamester. Now we know not how to inter¬ 
pret this in plain English otherwise than that you were 


432 


THE RECOIL. 


afraid that the height of his fortune might make him 
misknow (forget) himself. And surely, if that be your 
parent-like affection toward him, he hath no obligation to 
you for it.” 

In all this passage we see proof of that sense and dis¬ 
crimination which Disraeli the elder claimed for James, 
but which all his historians have not allowed. It can 
never be doubted by any person, however, who is familiar 
with his speeches and letters generally, that his intellect, 
while it was subject to many infirmities, was in some 
respects of a keen and penetrative order. But it needs 
no reflection to establish, that the greatest scholastic 
attainments, and a considerable discretion, are insuf¬ 
ficient to atone for that general balance of mind arising 
from a leaning between sentiments, emotions, affections, 
tastes, and reason, known as common sense. On the 
point of affection, however, James was sometimes keenly 
sensible. He knows the weight and pregnancy of Bacon’s 
phraseology, and resents it severely. He proceeds: he 
thinks Villiers the furthest removed from the vice of mis- 
knowing himself than any courtier he has, and so thinks 
Bacon will prove a very phoenix in discovering, so much 
more than others. But he thinks, moreover, that it less 
becomes Bacon than any man to speak thus of Bucking¬ 
ham, having so often spoken of him differently. 

Now a mist comes before Bacon’s eyes as he reads 
this. Can he believe it ? Is he only in some horrid 
dream, some dreadful phantasy ? The ground is crumbling 
even now beneath his feet perhaps. Such things have 
been. The cliff on which he rested,—will it sink into the 
sea and leave him to buffet with the waves? Horrible 


FRANCIS BACON’S SINCERITY QUESTIONED. 433 

fate! The King withdraw his favour! then farewell, a 
long farewell to all his greatness! What a fool has He 
been! The corn was not ripe. The moment was not 
auspicious. Yilliers was with his master, possessed his 
ear. Fatal mistake! Such wise disparagement, at any 
other moment, had not failed. Now, alas! James has 
shown the letter to Villiers and I am undone. 

His Majesty’s admonition concludes in dreadful temper 
and haste. He finds fault with Bacon for daring to re¬ 
fuse the warrant to Coke, as well he may. He does not 
believe Bacon’s protestations. If he pretends favour and 
love to Buckingham, why should he at the time help to 
cross his path? Essex wrote once, in effect, “Your ser¬ 
vices against me are active; your protestations are pas¬ 
sive.” The King will not speak of the obligations to 
Buckingham he is under, but merely of good manners. “ It 
were simply good and decent behaviour not to attempt to 
thwart him in anything wherein his name had been used, 
till you had heard from him.” But the proper course 
would have been to have given the warrant, and then 
written to us of the inconvenience of the match ; “ that 
would have been the part of a true servant to us, and of a 
true friend to him. But first to make an opposition, and 
then to give advice by way of friendship, is to make the 
plough go before the horse.” 

James finishes with this pregnant passage, which shows 
his disbelief in Bacon, and suspicion of his honesty. 

Thus leaving all the particulars of your carriage “ in 
this business to the proper time , which is ever the discoverer 
of truth , ive commend you to G-od.” 

In the 4 Cabala,’ there is a letter from Bacon, of the 


u 


434 


RETRACING STEPS. 


31st,* in reply to this, which was probably written on the 
28th. It is simply apologetic, and not unmanly, but explains 
that he will clear all up when the King arrives. Bucking¬ 
ham is silent. James does not return so rapidly as Bacon 
expected; is still idling, in his progress, south, in Lanca¬ 
shire and Cheshire.t On the 23rd of August, therefore, 
Bacon writes to Buckingham, that since his last letter he 
had sent for Mr. Attorney-General Yelverton, and made 
him know, that since he had heard from Court, he had re¬ 
solved to further the match and the conditions thereof, “ for 
your Lordship’s brother’s advancement the best I could. I 
did send also to my Lady Hatton, Coke’s wife ” (she per¬ 
sists in her old title, and will not be called Lady Cook, as 
she pronounces it to vex Coke), “ and some other special 
friends to acquaint them that I would declare, if any¬ 
thing, for the match so that they may no longer count 
on assistance. I sent also to Sir John Butler, and after 
by letter to my Lady (Compton), your mother, to tender 
my performance of any good office towards the match, 
or the advancement, for the mother. This was all I 
could think of for the present.” He concludes by com¬ 
plaining that Sir John Villiers and Lady Compton speak 
of him with bitterness and neglect. He thinks they are 
ruled by Coke and Winwood in the matter, the latter 
being more violent than Coke, who is “ more modest and 
discreet.” 

* Montagu, vol. xii., p. G5. 

f In Nichol’s ‘ Progresses/ vol. iii. James is mentioned as being at 
Carlisle, August 4th ; Appleby, 7th; Kendal, 9th ; Ashton Hall, 12th; 
the residence of the Gerards, 15th; Preston, Lancashire, 17th ; Hough¬ 
ton Towers, Chester, 23rd; Nantwich, 26th ; Stafford, 28th; Coventry, 
September 2nd, &c. 


BACON OCT OF FAVOUR WITH THE FAVOURITE. 435 


To this epistle Villiers answers curtly two days after:— 
“My Lord,— 

“I have received your lordship’s letter by your man ; 
but having so lately imparted my mind to you in my 
former letters, I refer your lordship to those letters without 
making a needless repetition, and rest, 

“ Your lordship’s at command, 

“ Buckingham. 

“Ashton, the 25th of Aug. 1617.” 

Buckingham is therefore offended; his letter is as brief 
and sharp as may be. Bacon is disgraced with the favour¬ 
ite, and is a ruined man, if he be not timely advised. 
He is timely advised. He despatches Yelverton as an 
emissary to make terms with the King and Villiers. 
Yelverton reaches the court at Daventry or Coventry, and 
at once writes back to report himself to his chief:— 

«My most worthy and honourable Lord,— 

“ I dare not think my journey lost, because I have 
with joy seen the face of my master the King, though more 
clouded towards me than I looked for.” 

Yelverton, as Bacon’s tool, has been more officious in 
this matter than has been good for him. He has interfered 
between Coke and his wife; has acted in all things at 
Bacon’s behest; is even now sent on this errand by Bacon ; 
has altogether a different carriage from Bacon as Attorney- 
General—being but the puppet, while, when Bacon was 
Attorney, he pulled the strings, corresponded with the 
King daily, and moulded Ellesmere to his hands like 
clay. 

The Earl of Buckingham is a courageous man, though 

u 2 


436 


yelverton’s report to bacon. 


ambitious, and selfishly bent on aggrandizing his family. 
As honest, as a man living in so corrupt a court, could 
be. From his own letters, from Wotton’s testimony, from 
Clarendon, we satisfactorily know, that up to this period 
of his life, his manner has been to some extent exemplary. 
He has been in no wise dizzied by his elevation. He 
has shown himself equal, as few men are, to good fortune. 
Yelverton sees him. With his usual manly candour, the 
favourite tells him that he is offended, but that he will 
not “ secretly bite.’' This is his manner; he always de¬ 
clares his enmity with more circumstance even than Essex 
would have used, being no less bold if less generous. 
Having seen the Earl in the presence of Coke, who is now 
in great favour with Buckingham, on account of this match? 
he had an interview with the King. The King hopes he 
may clear himself, hears his explanation and declaration, 
and then dismisses him. 

It is in effect that neither He, Yelverton, nor the Lord 
Keeper, ever hindered the match, but on the contrary, 
had, in “ many ways, furthered the marriagethat 
they had aimed only at checking Sir Edward’s carriage 
in the affair, which they wished had been more tem¬ 
perate, “and more nearly resembling the Earl’s sweet 
disposition (Yelverton is a courtier already, and no bad 
pupil of Bacon’s). 

Yelverton having concluded this his narrative, advises 
his chief, of the peril in which he stands, and suggests a 
mode of action as follows :— 

“ Now, my lord, give me leave, out of all my affections 
that shall ever serve you, to intimate touching your¬ 
self :— 


TREACHERY SUSPECTED. 


437 


“ 1. That every courtier is acquainted, that the Earl 
professeth openly against you, as forgetful of his kindness 
and unfaithful to him in your love, and in your actions. 

“ 2. That he returneth the shame upon himself in not 
listening to counsel that dissuaded his affection from you, 
and not to mount you so high, not forbearing in open 
speech, as divers have told the bearer of this despatch, 
your gentleman among the number, to tax you, if it were 
an inveterate custom with you to be unfaithful to him, 
as you were to the Earls of Essex and Somerset. 

“ 3. That it is too common in every man’s mouth in 
court, that your greatness shall be abated, and as your 
tongue hath been as a razor to some, so shall theirs be to 
you. 

“ 4. That there is laid up for you, to make your burden 
the more grievous, many petitions to bis Majesty against 
you. My lord, Sir Edward Coke, as if he were already 
upon his wings, triumphs exceedingly ; hath much private 
conference with his Majesty, and in public doth offer him¬ 
self, and thrust upon the King with as great boldness of 
speech as heretofore.” 

Buckingham returns to London; and the ' next inci¬ 
dent in Bacon’s life must be supplied from the pages 
of Weldon. 

Some historians or essayists have professed to doubt 
Weldon’s narrative; we see not on what ground. With 
singular inconsistency, they have accepted the same writer’s 
testimony on other subjects, where he is less to be relied 
on. Weldon declares himself the witness of the scene I 
am about to narrate. This is good evidence—as good as 
can be obtained now. lie declares, with respect to some 


438 SIR ANTHONY WELDON’S EVIDENCE. 

other matters which have been freely incorporated into 
history, that he believes—that is not good evidence. How¬ 
ever much, I may be inclined to doubt, that the haughty 
Lord Keeper, could be guilty of so profound a self-abase¬ 
ment, yet am I bound to credit the assertion of a man, who 
declares he saw it. Weldon is on the whole, I am in¬ 
clined to think, an unimpeachable witness. He had no 
personal enmity against Bacon. The story was not one 
which a man could invent; all that could be charged 
against it, is perhaps, that out of animosity, Weldon ex¬ 
aggerated the details. But unless some one shows that 
Weldon had such a motive, I deny the right even to this 
impeachment of his veracity. I hold it to be good history. 
Consistent with all Bacon’s character, consistent with the 
sequence of events before and after, improbable in no 
respect, impeachable by no prejudice. As the evidence 
of a qualified witness, detailing what he has seen, it is 
absolutely historic evidence of the first class, impeachable 
only by proof of incapacity in the declarer. On its face it 
seems authentic. The narrator has no apparent motive to 
be false. What he has seen he details. 

Here is Sir Anthony’s Narrative. 

“Now was Bacon invested in his office [of Lord 
Keeper], and within ten days after, the king goes to 
Scotland ; Bacon instantly begins to believe himself king; 
lies in the king’s lodgings; gives audience in the great 
banqueting house; makes all other councillors attend 
his motions, with the same state the king had used 
to affect, when giving audience to ambassadors. When 


THE RECONCILIATION WITH VILLIERS. 439 


any other councillors sat with him about the king’s 
affairs, he would, if they sat near him, let them know 
their distance ; upon which, Secretary Win wood rose, went 
away, and would never sit more under his encroached 
state, but instantly despatched one to the king, to desire 
him to make haste back, for even his very seat was already 
usurped : At which, I remember, the king reading it unto 
us, both the king and we were very merry, and if Bucking¬ 
ham had sent him any Letters, would not vouchsafe the 
opening or reading them in public, though it was said 
requiring speedy despatch, nor would vouchsafe him any 
answer. 

“ In this posture he lived until he heard the king was 
returning, and began to believe the Play was almost at an 
end. He might personate a king’s part no longer, and 
therefore did again reinvest himself with his old rags of 
baseness which were so tattered and poor. At the king’s 
coming to Windsor, he attended two days at Buckingham’s 
chambers, being not admitted to any better place than the 
room where trencher-scrapers and lackies attended, there 
sitting upon an old wooden chest among such persons as, 
for his baseness, were only fit companions, although the 
honour of his place did merit far more respect, with his 
purse and seal lying by him on that chest. I told a ser¬ 
vant of my Lord of Buckingham’s, it was a shame to see 
the purse and seal of so little value or esteem in his cham¬ 
ber, though the carrier without it merited nothing but 
scorn, being worst among the basest. He told me they 
had commands it must be so. After two days, he (Bacon) 
had admittance. At first entrance he fell down flat on his 
face at the Duke’s foot, kissing it, vowing never to rise till 


440 


“THE FORCE AND ROAD OF CASUALTY. 



he had his pardon. Then was he again reconciled, and 
since that time so very a slave to the duke and all that 
family, that he durst not deny the command of the 
meanest of his kindred, nor oppose anything (they de¬ 
sired). 

“ By this you see a base spirit is ever concomitant with 
the proudest mind, and surely never have so many parts 
and so base and abject a spirit tenanted together in any 
one earthern cottage as in this one man. I shall not for¬ 
get his baseness being out of his place (after his disgrace), 
of pinning himself, for very scraps in that noble gentle¬ 
man, Sir Julius Caesar’s hospitality, that at last he was 
forced to get the king’s warrant to remove him out of his 
house ; yet in his prosperity he (Bacon) being Chancellor, 
and Sir Julius Caesar Master of the Bolls, he had so served 
and abused him, as to reverse everything the other 
did/’* 

This then is Weldon’s account of Bacon’s apology for 
this error; of Bacon’s grand effort to retrieve himself 
in the favourite’s graces, and to avert that ruin which 
his presumption has hurried him into ; for although 
Bacon might have stood as proudly independent in his 
position as Chancellor, as Coke had done as Chief Jus¬ 
tice, his practical knowledge of law and his public cha¬ 
racter have not been sufficient to warrant his promotion, 
or to warrant his present place. He has already con¬ 
fessed the envy of some in certain particulars ; he knows 
well enough he is what he is by favour and not by 
merit; by secret chicanery, not by honest industry and 

* Sir Anthony Weldon’s ‘ Court and Character of James,’ pp. 132 
and 133. 


THE UNHOLY COMPACT. 


441 


integrity; that though crafty, he is not in favour with 
the judges, nor beloved by the people; that though he 
has made all his creatures judges, and advanced his 
followers well, according to the policy laid down in his 
Essays, yet that his foundations are not securely laid. 

This reference of his indebtedness to Sir Julius Csesar, 
who married Bacon’s niece, seems to have been justified 
not merely by such facts as are at our disposal to day, 
but by anecdotes which have variously descended. Of 
Bacon’s reconciliation immediately after Buckingham's 
return, and neither before nor after, there can be no doubt. 
Whether it took place with every circumstance of humilia¬ 
tion here narrated, there must be some little doubt. Sir 
Anthony, so far as he saw, was unimpeachable, and no doubt 
from his narrative saw Bacon sitting ignominiously among 
the servants. Whether he witnessed or was only told of his 
kissing Villiers’ feet is not certain ; yet all his story has 
coherence. His offending Winwood, his subsequent ani¬ 
mosity to that secretary, Winwood’s dislike, the King’s dis¬ 
pleasure, hardly to be accounted for by the mere corre¬ 
spondence on the Villiers and Coke marriage, are all 
corroborative. Villiers pardoned Bacon on the ground on 
which he placed him in his post—his servility. He knew 
him and used him. That he did so is shown by his corre¬ 
spondence ; and if it need further confirmation, it will be 
found in Weldon in the Appendix. 

Desperate diseases require desperate remedies. Bacon 
gains back Villiers’ apparent confidence, by Weldon’s 
account, by a personal interview with Buckingham. His 
reconciliation is only explicable, however, by the supposi¬ 
tion that Villiers knew him ; that Villiers despised him, 

u 3 


442 


THE TERMS OF OFFICE. 


but would continue to make him his tool, because he was 
more servile than any other man. 

To explain this, we must refer to Weldon again. He 
alleges that Villiers obtained for him the Keepership on 
the distinct ground of his subserviency. That, with his 
usual outspoken daring, knowing and despising Bacon, 
he sent to him a messenger with this message, “ That he 
knew him to be a man of excellent parts, and, as the times 
were, fit to serve the King in the keeper’s place ; but he also 
knew him of a base and ungrateful disposition, and an 
arrant knave, apt in his prosperity to ruin any that had 
raised him from adversity; yet, for all this, knowing him 
a good servant, had obtained the seals for him, but would 
give him this assurance, that should Bacon requite his, the 
Earl’s, services as he had done some others to whom he 
had been more hound, he would cast him down as much 
below scorn, as he had now raised him high above any 
honour he could ever have expected.” * 

This Sir Anthony states as of his own knowledge, how 
derived he does not say: the story is certainly most 
probable, being eminently characteristic. That the lan¬ 
guage was only in effect, and not precisely as stated, may, 
however, be considered probable. Bacon’s answer to this 
direct and open insult, according to Weldon, was no 
less in accordance with his character. 

Bacon, at this time Attorney-General, patiently hearing 
the messenger, replied: “lam glad my noble lord deals so 
friendly and freely with me, and hath made that choice of 
so noble and discreet a friend, that hath delivered his mes¬ 
sage in so plain a manner; but saith he, can, my lord, 
* Weldon, ‘ Court abd Time of James,’ 1650. 


villier’s compact with bacon. 443 

know these abilities in me and can he think, when I have 
attained the highest preferment my profession is capable 
of, I shall so much fail in my judgment and understanding 
as to lose these abilities, and my ingratitude cast myself 
headlong from the top of that honour to the very bottom 
of contempt and scorn ? Surely my lord cannot think so 
meanly of me.” The gentleman replied: “ I deliver you no¬ 
thing from myself, but the words are put into my mouth 
by his lordship, to which I neither add nor diminish; for 
had it been left to my own discretion, surely, though I 
might have given you the substance, yet should I have 
apparelled it in a more modest attire; but as I have 
faithfully delivered my lord's to you, so will I as faithfully 
return yours to his lordship.” 

Weldon, while on the theme, proceeds to explain 
that this conduct of the Earl’s was based on his knowledge 
of Bacon’s ungratefulness to Essex, “ for the Earl saved 
him from starving,” for which he requited him in such 
a manner as his (Bacon’s) Apology must witness. Had 
there been no crime, there needed no such defence, 
“ and only an age worthless and corrupt in men and 
manners could have thought him worthy of such a place 
of honour.” 

I know not how to refuse this testimony, coming com¬ 
mended, as it does, with every probability. Men cannot so 
conceal their crimes that they shall not gain wind. Buck¬ 
ingham knew of Bacon’s conduct to Essex; it must have 
been, as we see from Yelverton’s letter, common talk. 
Lord Southampton, Essex’s friend, is at the court still: 
there be many as well as he, to tell the tale. But the 
favourite wanted a tool to enrich his family and himself. 


444 


THE PARDON CONCEDED. 


Bacon was the precise man, yet it was necessary to guard 
against his treachery by an open explanation. Buck¬ 
ingham is no such fool as the King, to be gulled by fair 
words and flattery, and profane allusions to Scripture, 
and devout scraps of piety. He demands acts. Will 
Bacon lend himself? He will. Then the bargain is 
made; but it is so ill dealing with a knave that Bacon 
has already played Buckingham false ; and the point is, 
shall he hurl him down, or continue to use him ? 

He decides on the latter course; he restores him to 
some degree of favour, writes at once in behalf of certain 
suitors in Chancery, and uses him altogether as his lackey 
and slave. This is undeniable. Here is the letter, show¬ 
ing that pardon has been granted. 


TO THE EARL OF BUCKINGHAM. 


“ My ever best lord, none better than yourself,— 

“ Your lordship’s pen, or rather pencil, hath por¬ 
trayed towards me such magnanimity and nobleness and 
true kindness, as methinketh I see the image of some 
ancient virtue, and not anything of these times. It is the 
line of my life, and not the line of my letter, that must 
express my thankfulness; wherein, if I fail, then God fail 
me, and make me as miserable as I think myself at this 
time happy, by this reviver, through his Majesty’s singular 
clemency, and your incomparable love and favour. God 
preserve you, prosper you, and reward you for your kind¬ 
ness to your raised and infinitely obliged friend and ser- 

vant ’ “ Fr. Bacon. 


“Sept. 22, 1617.” 


September 5.—-A letter of Buckingham’s at Warwick 
shows that Bacon, in his anxiety, has sent a great number 
of letters begging him to reconciliation. Another, 
undated, refers to the very interview which Weldon pro- 


COURT JUSTICE. 


445 


bably refers to. From it we glean that Bacon offers to make 
“ a submission in writing,” which can be for no other pur¬ 
pose but that his word is considered of no avail. 

In October we find the two gentlemen again in corre¬ 
spondence. On the 11th, Bacon writes to Buckingham, 
detailing his work in Chancery, and from this letter 
we learn that the case of Egerton’s, one of those in 
which he was afterwards charged with bribery, is now 
pending. He has spoken with all the judges, signifying 
to them his Majesty's pleasure, in this acting as the mere 
mouthpiece of the King. The committee are proceeding 
with the purging of Coke’s Reports, “ wherein I told 
them his Majesty’s meaning was not to disgrace the person 
but to rectify the work, having in his royal contemplation 
rather posterity than the present. The case of the 
Egertons I have put off according to his Majesty’s com¬ 
mandment,” &c. 

Herein we gain another glimpse at the depravity of 
Bacon’s mind. Justice is a mere mockery, if it be not in¬ 
dependent of bias, or partiality to persons, yet here we see 
Bacon making it subservient to a King’s wishes. How 
opposed to Coke’s practice ! Coke is only head of an in¬ 
ferior court; he is not the legal head of the realm ; yet he, 
standing by the majesty of law, has defied the monarch, 
and has shielded and protected the subject against him. 
Can any one ever more wonder why Elizabeth, who knew 
a man’s character by intuition, did not favour and raise 
her “ young Lord Keeper ?” 

October 18th he sends another letter, alleging that 
he has “ reformed the ordinance according to his Majesty’s 
corrections;” another proof of the interference of the 


446 


A COMMAND REFUSED. 


crown. On the 28th of October, Buckingham, who wishes 
some illegal act done for his own benefit, writes to praise 
Bacon for his zeal in the King’s service. On the 28th, we 
have a letter from Bacon declining the illegal service, 
albeit on the face of it, there is no abuse concerned with 
it. As the letter is rather favourable to the Lord Keeper 
than otherwise, I will give it. 

“My very good Lord,— 

“I send your lordship the certificate concerning 
the enrolment of apprentices. We can find no ground for 
it by law. Myself shall be ever ready to further things 
that your lordship commandeth ; but where the matter 
will not bear it, your lordship, I know, will not think the 
worse, but the better of me, if I signify the true state of 
things to your lordship, resting ever, 

“Your lordship’s true friend and devoted servant.” 

In November, he is busy reorganizing the King’s 
household, the expenses of which are compelled to be cur¬ 
tailed by James’ straitened means! 

On 12th November, 1617, we find Buckingham plead¬ 
ing in behalf of Lord Stanhope, my Lord of Huntingdon, 
and Sir Thomas Gerard, and again, on the 22nd, in 
the matter of controversy between Barnaby Leigh, and Sir 
Edward Dyer, plaintiffs, and Sir Thomas Wynes, defend¬ 
ant, desiring favour for the plaintiffs so far as the justice 
of the case shall require. Yet on the very next day he 
writes again, this time to demand Bacon’s furtherance 
in the business of Sir Richard Haughton’s alum mines, 
for the present relief of Sir Richard Haughton. “ Any 
favour you will do I will not fail to achnowledge,” says 
Buckingham, and doubtless he will keep his word. Again 
on the day after there is an application on behalf of one 


THE LICENSE FOR ALE-HOUSES. 


447 


Thomas Stukely, a merchant; and on the 4th December, 
Sir Thomas Blackstone, he being a brother-in-law of Sir 
Henry Constable, whom Buckingham much respects. On 
New-Year’s day, 1618, Buckingham is made Marquis of 
Buckingham; and so well do these gentlemen play into 
each other’s hands, three days after Bacon is made Lord 
Chancellor and Baron Yerulam. 

In January, 1618, we light on another important letter, 
from which we learn that the suits in Chancery of Villiers’ 
friends or suitors are,—Hawkyn’s, Sir Rowland Egerton’s, 
Sir Gilbert Houghton’s, and Moore’s, this last being a 
patent for printing books, and 44 concerning the suit for 
ale-houses which concerneth your brother, Mr. Patrick 
Maule. I have conferred with my Lord Chief Justice, and 
Mr. Solicitor thereupon, and there is a scruple in it, that 
it should be one of the grievances put down in parliament; 
which if it be, I may not in my duty and love to you, 
advise you to deal in it; if it be not, I will mould it in 
the best manner and help it forward.” 

Within a week of the dignity of Chancellorship being 
granted, Yilliers solicits, in a letter from Royston,* 
Bacon’s aid, “ favour, and furtherance ” in the licence of 
ale-houses, for the benefit of his brother Christopher, 
44 whose benefit I have reason to wish and advance by 
any just courses.” 

It was among the grievances already struck at in parlia¬ 
ment. Notwithstanding its illegality, notwithstanding its 
oppression, as it is to enrich the favourite’s brother, Bacon 
will assist in it, if it is not contrary to parliament. There 
is no word against its iniquity or its injustice, but being 
# Montagu, vol. xii., p. 346. 



448 


THE EGERTONS’ SUIT. 


dangerous the Chancellor will advise Villiers in prudence 
not to push it. 

From this same letter we find that Bacon’s life has been 
threatened by one of his suitors, Lord Clifton. Bacon 
recommends an information in the Star Chamber, but will, 
from merciful consideration, withhold it for the present. In 
March, this same Lord Clifton, however, abuses Bacon to 
the King. 

Five days after Bacon’s elevation Villiers writes the 
following peremptory letter to the man he has just invested 
with the dignity of Lord Chancellor and Baron Verulam; 
in the suit of the Egertons, and actually defining the 
precise manner in which it is to be settled* :— 

TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR. 

“My honourable Lord,— 

“ I have heretofore recommended unto your Lordship 
the determination of the cause between Sir Rowland 
Egerton and Edward Egerton, who I understand did 
both agree, being before your Lordship, upon the values of 
the whole lands. And as your Lordship hath already 
made so good an entrance into the business, I doubt not 
but you will be as noble in furthering the full agreement 
between the parties: whereunto I am informed, Sir Row¬ 
land Egerton is very forward, offering on his part, that 
which to me seemeth very reasonable , either to divide the 
lands, and his adverse party to choose ; or the other to 
divide, and he to choose. Whereupon my desire to your 
Lordship is, that you would accordingly make a final end 
between them , in making a division and setting forth the 
lands according to the values agreed upon by the parties 
themselves. Wherein besides the charitable work your 
Lordship shall do, in making an end of a controversy 
between those, whom name and blood should tie together 

* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 345. 


DOUBLE BRIBERY. 


449 


and keep in unity, I will acknowledge your favour as unto 
myself and will ever rest 

“ Your lordship’s faithful servant, 

“ G. Buckingham. 

“ Theobalds, 9th January, 1617 (1618, N.S.)” 

We cannot now see all the strings, the wheels, and 
works of the machinery of that day; but plainly as 
anything can be interpreted, this note declares on the face 
of it—I have received a bribe in money or in kind, and 
therefore desire you to decide accordingly. Either 
Villiers is much more angelic and disinterested than the 
rest of the evidence against him would lead us to suppose, 
or this is a fair and correct interpretation. But if Villiers 
has been fee’d, the Chancellor, while obeying him, will be 
bribed too. For this is one of the identical cases in 
which Bacon afterwards acknowledges his receipt in all of 
seven hundred pounds, by two instalments, from Mr. 
Edward Egerton—a sum, be it remembered, equal to as 
many thousands in our days. 

The answer to this we have just read. Intermediately, 
another application on behalf of Sir John Cotton, who 
has been put from his office of custos rotulorum. 

On the 19th, we find Bacon acting in concert with 
the Bishop of Winchester (Dr. James Montagu), Bacon’s 
nephew Sir Julius Caesar, and Dr. Andrews, the Bishop of 
Ely. His servants, Sir Henry Montagu, and Sir Henry 
Hobart, Justices Dodderidge and Hutton, holding, at the 
instance of the King, an extra judicial court, concerning 
tithes. 

On the 20th, we find that Bacon had displaced Cotton 


450 


SIR GILES OVERREACH. 


in mistake, and will at once replace him if he desire it; 
and on the 23rd, a letter acknowledging “ your favour to 
Sir George Tipping,” from Buckingham. On the 28th, 
again, on behalf of Mr. John Huddy : “ My desire unto 
your Lordship is, that you would shew the said John 
Huddy, what favour you lawfully may, and as his cause 
will bear when it cometh before you, for my sake.” 
Again, on the 4th of February, for Robert Maxwell, and 
John Hunt, “for the making of sheriffs and escheatus 
patentsand on the same day, a suit between party and 
party; Sir Thomas Monk, who is a friend of my noble 
friend the Lord Norris, and who has a suit with Sir Robert 
Bassett, desiring what favour you lawfully may, as of old ; 
and on the 7th, we arrive at another link in the chain 
which is to bind Bacon, Prometheus fashion, to the rock 
when he is hurled down, viz., the complicity of Bacon in 
the Monpesson patents for gold thread. 

Sir Giles Monpesson, a man of an avaricious, sordid, and, 
by tradition, vile and malicious character—the original of 
the Sir Giles Overreach of Massinger’s play, and of the 
Justice Greedy of Ben Jonson—is in league with Villiers’ 
brother John, in a patent for gold lace. In other words^ 
the better to defraud the public, he has taken into 
partnership one of Villiers’ brothers. By the favourite’s 
and the Chancellor’s aid they secure to themselves a patent 
to plunder the public by manufacturing gold lace — obtain¬ 
ing the colour of a legal sanction to enable them to pass 
off counterfeit gold and silver lace of the worst materials 
at the prices of gold and silver. The iniquity of the 
whole proceeding cannot be exaggerated. A licence to 
pass counterfeit money would hardly be more profitable 


THE GOLD LACE PATENT. 


451 


or—pernicious. The whole country from end to end 
adorns itself with trappings of gold and silver thread. It 
is as much the fashion as ribbons or broad cloth to-day. 
The serving man, the knights, the prentices, the aldermen, 
all wear it. The imposition is, of course, eminently profit¬ 
able, while the quality of the article vended is so noto¬ 
riously bad, that it is said to cut and corrode its way into 
the flesh of those who use it.* It is the culminating and 
crowning iniquity of Monopolies. Other patents have 
been granted touching matters of more absolute necessity, 
but none in which so overwhelming a fraud on the public 
has been contemplated or accomplished. We have seen 
that Egerton, compliant and courtier-like as he was, re¬ 
fused to seal this and another patent for the licensing of 
inns, granted to the same persons. On the 7th of 
February, Buckingham writes, “ marvelling that his 
Majesty heareth nothing of the business touching the 
gold and silver thread ”—an allusion which shows first 
his interest, next the Chancellor’s complicity, and, as he 
refers to his Majesty, either his fear or dislike to be 
identified with the fraud. 

Five days after, and during Hilary Term, there is a 
letter of Buckingham’s, acknowledging Bacon’s services and 
kindness for a favour done to one of his suitors, Edward 
Flawkins ; and again, at the opening of Easter Term, 
another interference between party and party, in behalf of 
Sir Rowland Cotton, in a suit against John Gawen ; and 
in Trinity Term, again in behalf of a Mr. Hansbye. This 
being one of the cases in which, like the Egertons’, Bacon 
not only served his patron Villiers, but also served him- 


* Disraeli the elder. 


452 AID GIVEN BY THE CHANCELLOR TO THE PATENT. 


self, by obtaining from the suitors a large sum of money 
in the form of a gift or bribe—thus doubly benefiting in 
favour and in purse. It is not many judges who would 
have ingenuity so to combine advantages, while maintain¬ 
ing the semblance of justice. But Francis Bacon was no 
ordinary tactician. 

On the 15th of June, Buckingham writes again in a suit 
of Lady Vernon’s, avowedly on behalf of the king. Three 
days after to intercede for Sir Rowland Cotton, in his suit 
in Chancery in the matter of costs. Although the decision 
has been against Sir Rowland, “ yet he acknowledges 
himself much bound to your lordship for his noble and 
patient hearing.” This letter is precise and emphatic, 
“ because I am certainly informed Sir Rowland Cotton 
had just cause of complaint. I hope your lordship will 
not give any (costs) against him.” Buckingham writes to 
Bacon in August a long and important letter concerning this 
gold lace patent. A petition against it has been presented 
to the King : his Majesty refers it to Bacon. The patentees 
are being injured by the smuggling in, from foreign parts 
of gold and silver thread, as well as by the large quantities 
now remaining in merchants’ hands. Bacon is requested 
to interfere; “ he is to prosecute the cause he has so 
worthily begun, for prevention of further abuses therein; 
so as the agents may receive encouragement to go on 
quietly in the work without disturbance.” * 

On the 4th of October we find that the Chancellor 
with his old colleagues,—Montagu, Yelverton, Coventry, 
all now in office—are appointed by the King into a com¬ 
mission in the gold and silver thread business. This 
* Birch; Montagu, vol. xii., 353. 


KALEIGH SACRIFICED TO SPAIN. 


453 


month Buckingham is again interceding for a suitor, Sir 
Henry Englefield. On the 22nd, a peremptory note from 
Buckingham desires the prompt and final settlement, “ full 
arbitration and final end” of a suit of. Mr. Francis 
Foljambe v. F. Hansbye, and so the correspondence goes 
on—Buckingham asking favours for suitors, Bacon in¬ 
dubitably granting them. 

This proposition may not seem self-evident, yet can it 
be supposed that Buckingham would persist in writing 
useless letters ? that he would acknowledge favours never 
granted ? that suitors would seek him and so strengthen 
his influence at court, if they were not sure of gaining 
their ends ? In November, and the following months, we 
find “a recommendation of the business of Mr. Wyche,” 
a second application, the time of trial drawing nigh; a 
letter “ in behalf of Dr. Steward.” The last contains 
this sentence—“I have thought fit to use all freedom 
with you in this as in other things,” and on the latter, 
Bacon answers: “I forget not your doctor’s matter; I shall 
speak with him to-day, having received your lordship’s 
letter, and what is possible shall be done.” 

About this time Bacon’s iniquities grow apace. First, 
James, out of his cowardly fears, desires, as he thinks 
with good policy, to unite with the Spaniards. To this 
end he will sacrifice Raleigh, their old foe in England. 
The motive for James’ Spanish tendencies can only be 
found in his fears. He weakly thinks that it will be a 
good pact, to disarm an enemy by making him your friend. 
In some cases this may be, but never where there is so 
great an antipathy of blood, and race, and religion as then 
existed. Raleigh, however, was in the way, and the 


454 


BACON ASSISTS IN HIS SLANDER. 


King wished his removal. In 1603, he had been tried 
for high treason, and his sentence was then commuted. 
He was afterwards employed by James, with very full 
and complete powers, to colonize America, though he has 
never prospered since Essex’s death, having become emi¬ 
nently unpopular for his carriage towards that unfortu¬ 
nate nobleman. 

James would have him executed on the old sentence. 
Bacon as a lawyer, knows this will never do—that such 
a punishment would be contrary to all law. He prefers, 
as usual, more insidious courses. On the 18th of October 
he writes a long letter, directing the King how r to proceed. 
On the 24th, Raleigh is told he will be executed ; on the 
28th, he is sentenced; on the 29th, beheaded. At the 
end of November, we find that he has issued a pamphlet 
to blast Raleigh’s character with the nation, as a justifica¬ 
tion of his recent execution, just as he had done for 
Essex. The composition bears unmistakeable proof of 
Bacon’s hands, and should long since have been incor¬ 
porated in his works.* This e Declaration of the Demeanour 
and Carriage of Sir Walter Raleigh, knight,’ was printed 
at London, in quarto, early in December. A part is 
absolutely in Bacon’s hand, it was certainly under his 
supervision. His own letter says: n We have put the de¬ 
claration touching Raleigh to the press with his Majesty’s 
additions, which were very material and fit to proceed 
from his Majesty.” 

Next, Bacon’s care is to suggest to the King a mode 
of raising funds by making aliens denizens of this 
country. It was a private suggestion contained in a book 
* Vide Appendix. 


THE DUTIFUL SERVANT. 


455 


by a Mr. Hall, that first showed how this might be accom¬ 
plished. Bacon stopped the publication of the book, and 
advised the King to grant a commission or monopoly for 
the creation, thus seizing on the idea of a subject, and 
hindering him of his advantage for the Royal benefit. 
A few extracts from his letters to and from Villiers 
during December will show the progress of his indefati¬ 
gable labours for his Majesty and his favourite. 

VILLIERS TO BACON. 

“My honourable Lord,— 

“ I having understood by Dr. Steward, that your 
Lordship hath made a decree against him in the Chancery 
which he thinks very hard for him to perform, although I 
know it is unusual to your Lordship to make any altera¬ 
tions, when things are so far past; yet in regard I owe 
him a good turn, which I know not how to perform but 
this way, I desire your Lordship if there be any place 
left for mitigation, your Lordship w r ould show him what 
favour you may, for my sake, in his desires, which I shall 
be ready to acknowledge as a great courtesy done unto 
myself, and will ever rest 

“ Your Lordship’s faithful 

friend and Servant. 

“Newmarket, Dec. 1618. “ G. Buckingham.” 

BACON TO VILLIERS. 

“My very good Lord,— 

“ . . . . There came to the seal about a fort¬ 
night since a strange book passed by Mr. Attorney to 
one Mr. Hall; and it is to make subjects, (for so is deniza¬ 
tion), and this to go to a private use, till some thousand 
pounds be made by it. ... 'I acquainted the Commis¬ 
sioners with it, and by one consent it is stayed. But let 
me counsel his Majesty to grant forth a commission of this 
nature so to raise money for himself , being a flower of 


456 


THE WRITTEN AID TO MONPE3SON. 


the crown; and Hall may be rewarded out of it. . . . 
God ever bless and prosper you. 

“ Your Lordship’s most faithful 

and obliged Friend and Servant, 
“Dec. 8, 1618. “Fr. Yerulam, Cane” 

BACON TO VILLIERS. 

“ My very good Lord,— 

“ . . . . The patent touching Guinea and Bynny 
(Bonny ?), for the trade of gold, stayed first by myself, 
and after by his Majesty’s commandment, we have now 
settled by consent of all parties. 

“ Mr. Attorney by my direction hath made upon his 
information exhibited in the Star Chamber, a thunder mg 
information against the transportation of gold by the 
Dutch ;* which all the town is glad of; and I have granted 
divers warrants of Ne exeat regnum, according to his 
Majesty’s warrant. God ever bless you and keep ydu. 

“ Your Lordship’s most faithful 

and bounden Friend and Servant, 

“Fr. Yerulam, Cane” 

The multifarious demands on his time have not hindered 
him from concerning himself actively in a case of the Earl 
of Ormond’s—against whom there was at the instance 
of James, given subsequently, a most iniquitous decree, 
which Ormond refusing to submit to, was committed to 
the Fleet, remaining in prison till 1625 

In January and March, 1619, the old correspondence 
proceeds—favours asked and acknowledged for Sir John 
Wentworth, and a petitioner whose name, as hej is the 
bearer of his own note, is not given. In April, there is 
an interference in the suit of Sir Arthur Manwaring at 
the instance of the King, Sir Arthur having been steward 
* This has reference to the Monpesson Monopoly, and is in aid thereof. 



CRANFIELD, ANOTHER OF VILLIERS’ COURTIERS. 457 

to Lord Ellesmere. On behalf of Philip Bernardi, pos¬ 
sibly, a just and proper interference merely on state 
grounds. In May, Francis Verulam is moving in Suffolk’s 
business. This Peer had been made Lord Treasurer in 
1614. In his office he was in the way of Yilliers. The 
Favourite will have none but his merest tools and depen¬ 
dents about him, and is anxious to supplant him by Lionel 
Cranfield, “an informer,” a man of base and despicable 
character, whom he had raised step by step, through several 
grades of promotion, as he has elevated Bacon. Cran¬ 
field was a man, doubtless, of considerable penetration 
and sagacity, an acute and useful man of business, but on 
all hands admitted to be, a man of deplorable rascality. 
He has for his advancement, and the better to bind him¬ 
self to Yilliers, married into his family, for Yilliers in all 
things takes Bacon’s advice, as to advancing and support¬ 
ing oneself by followers. 

In deference to his patron’s wish, Bacon has long laid him¬ 
self out, to attack the Suffolks. He is the friend of Cran¬ 
field ; and Cranfield, as we know from Yilliers’ letters, 
takes every opportunity of eulogizing Bacon, which Yilliers, 
knowing it to be to his own interest to have his creatures 
amicably bound together, duly reports to Bacon. As far 
back as July of last year, Bacon, in a letter to Bucking¬ 
ham, attacks Suffolk, from which we may learn which way 
the wind sets. In May, Buckingham—for by this time the 
king is only the puppet in the Earl’s hands—grants Bacon 
1,20(Y. a year, in answer, perhaps, to a begging petition 
for some substantial favour addressed to his Majesty, 
through the Earl, some time before. We find no corre¬ 
spondence now with James. The Earl is too wise to 


458 THE PLUNDER OF THE NATION. 

permit that. He is the medium of all communication with 
the sovereign. He fears not such men as Cranfield or 
Bacon, but he will not trust them between himself and his 
master. Promotion, advancement he will give them. He 
shines more in their honour, but trust them he will not. 

In May, 1619, we find Bacon dealing in a case of 
witchcraft, and desiring his friends, Sir Thomas Leigh 
and Sir Thomas Puckering, to deal with the person 
accused, one John Clarkson of Knowington.* Before 
this however, probably in December of the preceding 
year, Bacon, with his colleagues Montagu and Yelverton, 
have decided that the gold and silver thread business is 
likely to be very profitable to his Majesty, and to yield 
him at least 10,000?. a year, and should therefore be pro¬ 
ceeded with.f We find, moreover, that the Sir Gilbert 
Houghton, benefited in his suit at Villiers’ entreaty, is a 
follower of that nobleman. We have also proof that two 
men, Lewis and Williams, having entered into a contract 
for a monopoly in the transport of butter out of Wales with 
Villiers’ brother, refuse to perform the condition of their 
contract so far, it is presumed, as to pay the Villiers’ their 
share of the plunder. This patent, sealed by Bacon, is 
conditional on the concealment of the Villiers’ name and 
a division of the spoil; whereupon Bacon’s aid is again 
needed to use the Chancery, as a means of vengeance 
to complete this private bargain, in which, no doubt, 
Buckingham himself is directly interested. 

Bacon is now in high favour again. His praises of 
himself, in James’s own words, as pursuing affairs, “sua- 

* Mallett, Montagu, vol. xiii., p. 5. 

f Stephen, Montagu, vol. xiii., p. 17. 


bacon’s star again in the ascendant. 459 

vibus modis,” and as being, “ in the words of St. Paul, 
omnibus omnia,” all things to all men, and as pursuing 
great courses, “ sine strepitu,” noiselessly, are frequent. In 
September and October, James, through Buckingham, fre¬ 
quently praises the Chancellor. He is retrieving his in¬ 
gratitude. He is carrying the “ ore tenus,” concerning 
the Dutch exportation, with great diligence in the Star 
Chamber, in this procuring the King fame, and enriching 
the family of the favourite. Buckingham again addresses 
him as his faithful friend and servant; and in one letter 
says that his slave, in the Roman fashion, deserves a gar¬ 
land for his services, and desires him also to bear his 
thanks to Coke, showing that again the Chancellor is 
triumphant and rides above his adversary. 

In June, July, and August, he is preparing for the 
trial of Lady Exeter, accused of incest, and Suffolk’s cause 
fixed, de bene esse, the third sitting next term. 

Bacon about this time grows absolutely affectionate. 
He and Buckingham never interchange an epistle with¬ 
out a vast display of love, that with such men argues 
little for its sincerity or continuance. The grant of 1200?. 
a year in the preceding May, has produced this fervour. 
The Chancellor is, as usual on the instant—grateful. It 
is unluckily the case that the converse of the proverb 
that “ when knaves fall out,” &c., especially holds—this 
newly-cemented affection auguring much mischief to the 
commonwealth. Here are some of the evidences of these 
new ties of consanguinity. 

BACON TO VILLIERS. 

“. . . . This morning the King of himself 

did tell me some testimony, that your Lordship gave of me 

x 2 


460 FURTHER ELEVATION CONTEMPLATED. 

to his Majesty even now, when you went from him, of. so 
great affection and commendation (for I must ascribe 
your commendation to affection, being above my merit) 
as I must do contrary to that, that painters do ; for they 
desire to make the picture to the life, and I must endea¬ 
vour to make the life to the picture, it hath pleased you 
to make so honourable a description of me. 1 can be but 
yours, and desire to better myself , that I may be of more 
worth to such an owner. . . . 

“God ever preserve and prosper you. 

“ Your Lordship’s most obliged Friend 
“ and faithful Servant, 

“July 19, 1619. “Fr. Verulam, Cane' 1 

BACON TO VILLIERS. 

* * * * 

“ 1 am glad the time approacheth, when I shall 
have the happiness to kiss his Majesty’s hands, and to 
embrace your lordship. 

“ Ever resting, &c. 

“August 28, 1619. “Fr. Verulam.”* 

In October, Buckingham is again asking favours for 
suitors, and now the infamous prosecution for the removal 
of Buckingham’s stumbling-block, the Suffolks, comes on. 
As usual, when miscreant proceedings are to be accom¬ 
plished, Montagu and Hobart are at hand. The letter is 
worthy preservation. 

TO THE MARQUIS OF BUCKINGHAM. 

“ My very good Lord,— 

“ After my last letter yesterday we entered into 
conference touching the Suffolk cause, myself, and the 
commissioners and the two Chief Justices. The fruit of 
this conference is that we all conceive the proceedings 
against my lord himself to be not only just and honour¬ 
able, but in some principal parts plausible in regard of the 
* Stephen; Montagu, vol. xvii., p. 13. 


THE JUDGE’S REPORT TO HIS MASTER. 461 

public; as, namely, those three points which touch upon 
the ordnance, the army'of Ireland, and the money of the 
cautionary towns; and the two Chief Justices (Hobart 
and Montagu) are firm in it. I did also in this cause, by 
the assent of my lords, remove a part; for Mr. Attorney 
had laid it upon Sergeant Davies to open the informa¬ 
tion, which is that which gives much life or coldness to 
the cause. But I will have none but trained men in 
this cause; and I cannot forget that the allotting of the 
opening of the information in this cause of the Dutch (I 
mean the main cause) to a mean fellow, one Hughes, did 
hurt, and was never well recovered. 

“ By my next I will write of the King’s estate : and I 
ever rest, 

“ Your Lordship’s most obliged Friend 
and faithful Servant, 

“ Oct. 14, 1619. “ Fr. Verulam.” 

In the same month the Suffolk case is tried; and 
Verulam writes during the progress of the trial to Bucking¬ 
ham, to tell him how he has warped and hindered 
justice:—“ That this day the evidence went well; that a 
little too warm the business. I spake a word,” viz., against 
the prisoner, “ to this effect—That he that drew or milked 
treasure from Ireland, did not milk money but blood.” 

In December, Bacon takes Monpesson down with him 
to Kew. Monpesson has some schemes professedly to 
assist the King’s revenues. From this we see that amity 
exists between the two men—that a show of public service 
is made to cover the nefarious dealings of this arch-swindler 
Monpesson. The conclusion of the letter, December 12th, 
referring to this, is interesting. 

Bacon communicates to the King that he has obtained 
a verdict in the Suffolk case, to put him out of suspense. 


402 A MERRY AND MODEST REQUEST. 

Their fines will be moderate, but far from contemptible. 
Buckingham answers, “ that the King gives many thanks 
to Bacon, having seen his exceeding diligence in this great 
business, and that he, James, sees that he plays the part 
of all in all.” 

Bacon announces that the fines in the two causes (that 
of the Dutch and the Suffolks, it must be presumed) are 
180,000?.: Suffolk’s was 30,0007. “And if the King intend 
any gifts, let them stay for the second course ; for all is 
not yet done; but nothing out of these, except the King 
should give me the 20,0007. I owe Peter Vanbore out of 
his fine, which is the chief debt I owe. But this I speak 
merrily.”* A modest request for a Chancellor to make, and 
little in accordance with his lofty office, inclining to sus¬ 
picion that Vanbore has suffered through being his creditor. 

After looking at these facts may we not ask, Is there 
neither shame nor decency in Verulam ? He has received 
12007. per annum, yet he begs for more. He aims already 
at further dignities and elevation in the peerage, and 
looks forward, doubtless with complacency, to the pros¬ 
pect of the Garter, an extended power, and a more 
widely gratified ambition. 

But when the fruit is ripest the shedding of the seed 
is nigh, and danger dwells hard by honour, as death is 
the end of ambition. Let the pride that goes before 
destruction and the haughty spirit, beware ! 


* Bircli; Montagu, vol. xii., p. 380. 


DANGER IN THE WIND. 


463 


CHAPTER XXL 

At last a nation, groaning under every conceivable 
iniquity of taxation and extortion—illegal, rapacious, and 
arbitrary—is to have redress. A parliament is to be 
called. In November and December, Bacon is busy 
arranging the writs. At the same time he is examining 
Peacock, and with his old wickedness urging that he shall 
be put to the rack. He is consulting with Buckingham 
and the King as to the measures to be adopted before, and 
after the opening of parliament to quiet the clamours of the 
outraged nation. From end to end of England, the cry 
of oppression has gone up. Petitions have flowed into 
Knights of shires, complaining of the extortion of patentees, 
particularly of Monpesson and his agents, in the matter of 
inns and gold lace. Petitions have also poured in con¬ 
cerning Bacon and his court. He has been charged with 
taking bribes. It has been openly whispered about, that 
there was no sure way of obtaining justice but with money 
in hand to sue to the Lord Chancellor. 

The last six years of Bacon’s and Villiers’ administra¬ 
tion have carried the country a hundred years forward in 
suffering, in misery, and in revolt If twenty years shall 


464 


THE TORTURE OF PEACOCK. 


see a king beheaded, how much have Bacon and Villiers 
done towards the act! But public cares do not bear 
down the indefatigable hand of the great Chancellor. 
On the 10th of February he has time to write, “ If it may 
not he done otherwise, it is fit Peacock be put to torture. 
He deserveth it as well as Peacham did.” 

The defence of Bacon’s friends has sometimes been, 
that he was justified in Peacock’s racking, because Coke’s 
name is to his deposition; that, in other words, Coke was 
as criminal as Bacon. Here we see that the fact is not 
so. Bacon is the supreme adviser of the crown. He 
directs in chief. To give colour to his proceedings, he 
has only to desire Coke’s name to a document. Coke 
might refuse, it is true, hut it would be extraordinary 
and beyond precedent to do so. The diabolic suggestion 
we see here originates with Bacon. He is the arch pro¬ 
poser. It is not the monarch this time who desires it, 
hut Bacon. If the Chancellor obtain his wish as he does, 
Coke has only to put his name to the depositions, and has 
no power to stay Verulam’s hand. It is Bacon’s sin, that 
he is chargeable with a second case of torture; that to 
his eternal infamy it is to be charged upon him; that 
he is the “ all in all ” of the iniquity. Peacham was an old 
man, and in the course of events could not have hoped to 
live long. To weaken him, to deprive him of health and 
strength, to cripple him, or make his life a burden, were 
very grievous; but if it were so, this case of Peacock’s is 
even worse. 

Shall we depict the strong man led out hound to worse, 
much worse than death? In death there is a swift re¬ 
prieve, a sharp pang, hut the journey is dark, and without 




A CLAIM TO BE THE “BEST OF CHANCELLORS.” 465 

imagination a man has few evils to encounter. But the 
prospect of a lingering life in pain, with broken bones, 
with diseased joints, will strike the most callous heart. 
If the man is borne down even to tears who shall be 
surprised? He knows that ere the sun has gone down, 
his hopes of life and joy will be crushed for ever. That 
for him henceforth existence will drag wearily on. That 
his strength will be but weakness, his life but a heaviness, 
his course of hope but despair. He will be old before his 
time, smitten swiftly, as by an assassin stroke, with age. 
Blasted into misery and grief. He recoils at the ghastly 
and bloody instruments of torture, the wheel, the 
“manacles,” the slow fire—Bacon’s suggestion—and the 
torturing screws. He knows that the flesh will be torn 
from his quivering body, and that death were a merciful 
and noble relief. 

Yet such a fate was the apostle of truth prepared to 
inflict on his fellow man for the basest hopes of self- 
aggrandizement—such cruelty enact, with the mere hope 
of conciliating a patron, and of establishing himself in 
power. 

In this very letter, containing the suggestion, “ If it 
may not be done otherwise , it is fit Peacock be put to the 
torture,” there is a claim made for praise so like satire 
that Satan might have guided the hand. 

“ As without flattery I think your Majesty the best of 
Kings, my noble Lord of Buckingham the best of persons 
favoured, so I hope without presumption, for my honest 
and true intentions to state and justice and my love to 
my master, I am not the worst of Chancellors.” 

No great changes have taken place during the last 

x 3 


46G THE EIGHTH AND LAST HONOUR ! 

twelve months. The same even course of favouring Vil- 
liers’ suitors is held. Yelverton, however, has fallen a 
little into disfavour with Bacon. In February he writes 
to Buckingham : “ Mr. Attorney growing pretty pert with 
me of late; but be they flies or he they wasps, I neither 
care for buzzes nor stings in anything that concerneth 
my duty to his Majesty or to your lordship.” In June he 
is informed against at Bacon’s instance in the Star 
Chamber, and the Commissioners advise his seques¬ 
tration.* Bacon has framed some laws for the manage¬ 
ment of the Star Chamber, which he regards as one of 
the pillars of the state, although contrary to the com¬ 
mon law of the realm and a mere court of inquisition. 

In October of this year he has brought out his 4 Novum 
Organum,’ which he dedicates, in his usual and charac¬ 
teristic style of servile adulation, to his Majesty, styling 
him among men 44 the greatest master of reason and 
author of beneficence.” He is not unaware of the un¬ 
popularity and scandal created by the monopolies. In 
November he speaks of two— 44 the one of Sir Giles Mon- 
pesson, touching inns, the other touching recognizances 
for ale-houses, are more renowned both by the vulgar and 
by the gentlemen, yea, and by the judges themselves, than 
any other patents at this day.” In December he suggests 
that while parliament lasts they should be abolished, to be 
restored again after. 

In January 1621, he is created Baron St. Albans by 
plenary investiture. 

44 This is the eighth honour,” writes Bacon, in acknow¬ 
ledgment of the royal favour, 44 your Majesty hath 
* Montagu, vol. xii., p. 372. 




REDRESS IMMINENT AT LAST. 


467 


given me, a diapason in music, even a good number and 
accord for a close.”* He little thinks how nearly his 
wisdom is prophetic. 

On the 30th, Parliament met, James opening it in 
person, and, contrary to his usual custom, riding and 
saluting the people, with much graveness, saying, “ God 
bless ye!” till coming opposite a window where some 
ladies were seated in yellow ruffs, the royal dignity 
could not contain itself, but shouted out, “ Pox take ye! 
are ye there?” he having an aversion to that fashion. 

One of the first acts of the new Parliament is to declare 
for freedom of speech, beginning with religion. The 
Commons commenced, as Bacon feared, with grievances, 
particularly those referring to Mitchel and Monpesson. 
On the 23rd, Mitchel is sent ignominiously to the Tower: 
by the 8th Monpesson has fled, and a proclamation has 
issued. On the 10th, a conference was held by both 
houses on the subject, “ the inducement to this conference 
being to clear the King’s honour touching grants to Sir 
Giles, and the passages in procuring the same.” At this 
conference Bacon, hardly to his surprise, because he knew 
himself implicated, but perchance with fear, found himself 
involved. 

The Earl of Pembroke afterwards complained that 
St. Albans and the new Lord Viscount Mandeville (Sir 
H. Montagu), the Lord Treasurer, spoke in their own 
defence, not being allowed to do so when the committees 
were named ;’f in other words, taken from Camden, the 
House complains that the lawyers whom they sent to 

* Feb. 17, 1619-20. Montagu, vol. xii., p. 403. 
f Montagu, vol. xii., p. 405. 


468 


ENGLAND AROUSED. 


appeal and refer a matter to the Lords, acted deceitfully 
and prevaricated. This is on the 9th of March. Now 
this mighty tower which Bacon has with so much labour 
budded upwards to scale the skies, in defiance of truth 
and justice, of heaven’s mandates, and the fear of God, 
rocks to its fall. Tongues wag against him, prevarica¬ 
tion cannot save him. 

The House is in earnest. Gondomar’s sarcasm, “ That 
there are many people in England but no men,” has gone 
out, and will strike fire in many hearts. What though near 
twenty years of wretched rule have reduced an orderly 
household into chaos and disorder. What though miserable 
imbecility has degraded the court, turned the sword of 
Hercules into a distaff, made Samson a blind buffoon; 
yet there is vitality left. 

Only those who know in a house of business, in a 
bank, in a household, in a corporation, what evil may 
be wrought by incompetency, can appreciate the mischief. 
Yet every evil is magnified by the scale of its enlarge¬ 
ment. ’Tis not a town, or city, but an empire that has 
been endangered. Crime has begotten crime till the 
progeny is monstrous in number and form. The utmost 
imagination can barely conceive what seventeen years of 
James’s government have wrought. 

All historians agree on this point. The profligacy of 
the court is unparalleled. There is no statesman, no 
lawyer, save Coke/ worthy the name. Villiers is the 
Monarch, and he, preferring pleasure to work, is in great 
part ruled by his mother. The King is but a puppet in 
their hands. She, the Lady Compton, has the best head 
and the most powerful hand at court. Gondomar writes 


THE CONSPIRATORS OVERTHROWN. 


469 


home, professedly to his master, that there is hope of 
England’s conversion to their faith now. “ More prayers 
are offered to the mother than the son.” The Commons 
see in the mother and her brood the authors of all their 
misery. They are loth to strike at the crown, such 
divinity doth hedge a King. They are not strong enough 
yet to touch Villiers, that will come by-and-by. Coke 
will do it. No man else. No other man will dare. No 
other man will have the power. But at present the 
branches must be lopped, though the timber stand. Bacon 
and Yelverton are compromised. Mitchel, Monpesson, and 
Villiers’ brother. Two of the gang have fled. Mitchel is 
in the Tower. Bacon and Yelverton are at hand. 

But Bacon’s complicity in these monopolies—Bacon’s 
merely indirect aid in their frauds—will not be his down¬ 
fall. He is too high for that. Matter blacker is at 
hand. For months petitions have grown, accusing him of 
scandalous practices as a judge. He, the fit and worthy 
confederate of Monpesson and Mitchel, must stand and 
fall with them. The Commons is hot on the scent. His 
case is pernicious in the extreme. Coke knew him from 
the commencement; hence their antipathy. He will take 
care that Bacon has justice. In all their long quarrel, 
his rival has shown great forbearance, save and except 
his carriage against him as Attorney. The great Chief 
Justice has borne with him. He did not answer his 
virulent letter. He apparently never resented it. He 
knew his duplicity, his cowardice, his treachery. But no 
accusation or abuse of Bacon lies in his writings against 
him. He has observed, “ that his gettings were like a 
prince with a strong hand, and his spendings like a pro- 


470 


IMPENDING JUSTICE. 


digal with a weak head,” and has forborne to let mere 
personal animosity induce vengeance, to fall. But another 
hand than his, is to fashion the stroke, a greater power 
than his, urge on retribution. 

Here is the history of the proceeding. 

On the 6th of February, Mr. Glanville rises to speak. 
There is a general complaint throughout the Kingdom of 
the great scarcity of money, and it is a question well 
worthy the consideration of this house whether this 
complaint be well or ill grounded. In some places the 
price of land has fallen for twenty years’ purchase to as 
little as twelve or thirteen years’. Landlords can get no 
rent for their lands. No money has been coined these 
ten or twelve years. Some say there is too much coin 
carried northward (a hint to the King) ; some say that it 
is the excess of plate used by the nobility and gentry, 
others the transport abroad, or the patent of the East 
India Company. 

Sir W. Spencer, son and heir of the Lord Spencer, 
with the bluntness of youth rises to speak. He plunges 
at once in medias res. He speaks the popular thought. 
There is also another and a better reason than any of 
those given by Mr. Glanville—a patent for gold and 
silver lace, which hindereth to the extent of 40,000Z. per 
annum the country, by preventing the importation. 

Sir Edward Sackville rises. It is proper and usual to 
proceed in such matters by petition to the King. That in 
all such petitions certain referees, competent to decide on 
the merits of the question, are appointed. There have 
been referees so appointed in this very case (Sir Francis 
Bacon, Montagu, Yelverton, Sir Edward Coke). He there- 


PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE. 


471 


fore desireth that those who were referees in this business, 
and have satisfied his Majesty of the convenience of it, and 
have thereby so much abused both his Majesty and the 
commonwealth, may be known, and that their reasons be 
examined, to the end that they may receive the blame 
and shame of it. 

Here then is the commencement of the inquisition into 
Bacon’s delinquencies that will end in his ruin. It 
proceeds from an independent member of the house, from 
the member for Sussex, a man having no interest whatever 
for or against Bacon, who merely acts in the cause of 
justice. 

Sir Giles Monpesson rises at this point to desire that 
the gold refiners may be called to declare what they think 
of the scarcity of coin. 

Directly he sits down, Sir W. Stroud rises to move 
that no person interested in these patents, be allowed to 
sit on the committee. After which it was resolved that 
all these motions, be referred to the Committee of 
Grievances. On the 19th the Committee of Grievances sits, 
and Monpesson’s patents are at once struck out. This 
time it is a Mr. Noy, the member for Helston, who rises. 
Monopolies and power of dispensing with penal laws (by 
arbitrary proclamation of the King) are the chief grounds 
of all the grievances. Before any patent is passed, a 
petition is made to the King, showing what good will 
accrue to the commonwealth, by the same. What benefits 
will ensue, what abuses are likely to arise from it. His 
Majesty referreth the petition to those whom he thinks 
fittest to consider it, both in law and for convenience, and 
motives of policy. The referees thereupon certify as to its 


472 


THE NATURE OF THE GRIEVANCES. 


advantage or disadvantage to the realm “ therefore it is 
most fit the referees should be examined.” 

Now we have seen that Bacon, in his exceeding zeal 
to do dirty work, sought for this appointment of referee 
—not merely sought for it, but packed his brother commis¬ 
sioners. In his letter of November 13th, 1616, before 
he was created Lord Keeper, we find him writing to 
Villiers to appoint himself, Finch, and Montagu to the 
commission. So here is a blow again at Bacon. Mr. 
Noy proceeds to show the intolerable nature of many of 
these monopolies, and finishes by demanding that, as all 
these projectors clearly work against the King’s command, 
it were good to send for them and examine them, and if 
they have done ill to punish them. 

Then Sir Edward Coke rises. He deprecates the wrath 
of the house. So far from making a partisan speech, or 
one directed against the Monopolists, he to some extent 
justifies them. As usual, he is simply for the law, for 
the abstract truth. In his first speech in the session 
he has pursued his old and even course, which he has for 
so many years constantly maintained, of rigid and inde¬ 
pendent justice. Upholding in its integrity constitutional 
law. He says now, “ There is Prerogative indisputable 
and Prerogative disputable.” The power of the King 
to make war is his indisputable right, but his disputable 
prerogative is tied to the laws, and bound down by them. 
Yet these monopolies have good precedent, “ fine 
examples.” They are of three kinds. 1st, Against the 
law. 2nd, Good in law but bad in execution. 3rd, 
Neither good in law nor in execution. The patent for 
inns comes under the second head. Monopolies are now 



RETRIBUTION AT LAST. 


473 


grown like Hydras’ heads—they grow up as fast as they 
are cut off. Yet all Kings, from Edward III. to this 
monarch, have granted monopolies: even in Queen Eliza¬ 
beth’s time there were some granted. But if the King 
has been wronged the referees are to blame. 

Divers members on successive days speak more or less 
to the point. On the 2nd of March the Committee of 
Grievances is prepared to speak. They desire that a 
message should be sent to the lords, that they have dis¬ 
covered matters and offences tending to the wrong of his 
Majesty, in his justice, honour, and estate. To the 
disinheritance of his subjects, and the corruption of the 
commonwealth, and this by a man of quality; and there¬ 
fore they pray a conference. In the Parliamentary History 
this is assumed to be Monpesson. Possibly it is, yet he is 
not a man of quality. He is only one of James’s new 
knights. It is equally possible that this is Bacon. I 
offer no opinion either way. It is all but immaterial. 
Yet certainly Monpesson cannot be called a person of 
quality. A man held in general contempt. A mere 
trader. A member of parliament it is true, but not a person 
of quality. The allusion evidently refers either to one 
of the Villiers’ family or Bacon! Before the 3rd, Mitchel 
has been apprehended and sent with ignominy to the 
Tower bare-headed and on foot. Monpesson has fled 
beyond seas, his neck being in danger. 

Sir Giles’s house is ordered to be searched, and all 
his papers concerning his patents and monopolies 
examined. On the 6th these are brought into the house. 
On the 7th Bacon writes to Buckingham: “ I do hear 
from divers of judgment, that to-morrow’s conference 


474 


THE CHANCELLOR IN DANGER. 


is like to pass in a calm as to referees. Sir Lionel 
Cranfield doth now incline, not to have the referees 
meddled with, otherwise than to descant it from the King 
and so not to look back, hut to the future. And I 
do hear almost all men of judgment in the house wish 
now that way. I woo nobody. I do but listen, and I 
have doubt only of Sir Edward Coke, who I wish had 
some round caveat ” (beware !) “ given him from the King; 
for your Lordship hath no great power over him, hut I 
think a word from the King mates him.” 

Bacon then goes on to suggest that Buckingham shall 
speak to-morrow, and show thus more regard of the fra¬ 
ternity you have with great counsellors (meaning himself) 
than of the interests of your natural brother. A modest 
and a fair request. The same night he receives at 
midnight a messenger from the King. At seven the next 
morning, “ to avoid note,” Bacon goes to Whitehall to 
meet the Prince (Charles) who is at the head of the com¬ 
mittee of forty peers of the lords appointed to confer. He 
agrees with the heir apparent to ask time, if the Lords call 
upon him. He then sees the Archbishop of Canterbury 
and not “ letting him know any part of the house,” sug¬ 
gests that he should go on with a motion “ That the lords’ 
house might not sit Wednesday and Friday because they 
were convocation days.” Wily statesman! Admirable 
plan! As good luck would have it, the house read two 
bills only, and had no other motions on, whereupon the 
archbishop (poor catspaw !) made his motion, and “ I ad¬ 
journed the house till Saturday.* It was no sooner done 
but came the message from the lower house. But the 
* The 10th. 


INCREASING TERRORS. 


475 


consummatum est was passed, though I perceived a great 
willingness in many of the lords to have recalled it, if 
it might have been.” Bacon immediately rushes home 
and at eleven o’clock writes to the King. 

On Monday,* satisfaction was demanded of Bacon 
and Montagu because they had spoken at the conference 
of the two houses on Saturday in their own defence, 
not being allowed to do so. Lord Bacon acknowledged 
he had so spoken more than he had direction from the 
house to do, and had erred therein. Which acknowledg¬ 
ment the lords in general accepted. 

Parliament is so much in earnest, the court so much in 
need of money, that, no matter who stands or falls, the 
King must give way. He sends word by Buckingham, he 
will hold himself neuter. Buckingham declares he will, 
not being himself touched, give up his two brothers to 
justice. He would not defend them, but leave them to the 
censure of parliament. He tells the house “ That he 
who had begot these two, had also begot one, who would 
seek for their punishment.” Buckingham is friendly with 
Bacon, remains so in all his troubles. But he cannot save 
him, he knows that. The King will do all that he can: 
and has written to Bacon to advise him. He has been 
privy to a secret interview at seven in the morning with 
his son and the Chancellor, and is so far conniving at his 
servant’s acts. But even he cannot overcome the parlia¬ 
ment. Bacon now begins to tremble. 

This Committee of Grievances, bent on discovering 
iniquities in letters patent, will discover his bribes. At 
a sitting of the committee there will come out, among 


* The 12th. 


476 


JUSTICE ON THE UNJUST JUDGE. 


other frauds exposed, the circumstance, that Bacon has 
taken a bribe of one hundred pounds from the Company 
of Apothecaries. 

Bacon sees that the land on which he stood is washing 
away—that the unsubstantial favour of princes is nothing 
against the whole people in arms—that the rock he has 
budded on, is mere sand against the tide of men. Even now 
the ocean roars in his ears, the waves jump and lick 
their prey. He is desolate. Even there, where he should 
be strongest, he is disunited and broken. His wife is no 
comfort to him. He has no home. In deserting her, and 
his own hearth, for fame and profit, for aggrandisement and 
personal ambition, he has lost what should have been 
his only consolation and hope in life. His wife, however, 
has gone her ways as he has gone his.* They are at 
enmity. He is, indeed, a broken, miserable old man. The 
words of Shakspere seem here all but prophetic; so 
fearful are they in their application. But they rise not to 
Bacon’s lips, for, so far as we learn, the Chancellor had 
failed to discover the wisdom of the poor player. The 
greatest wisdom lies undiscovered. Shakspere is plebeian, 
of no note in the world, therefore no prophet in his own 
country. 

Lord St. Albans writes now, probably, a letter to the 
Duke of Buckingham, which is preserved, but is unluckily, 
dateless. 

“ My very good Lord,— 

“ Your lordship spoke of purgatory. I am now 
in it; but my mind is in a calm ; for my future is not my 
felicity. I know I have clean hands, and a clean heart; 

* Kennet’s History : Wilson, vol. ii., p. 734. 


FIGHTS TO THE LAST. 


477 


and, I hope, a clean house for friends and servants. But 
Job himself, or whoever was the justest judge, by such 
hunting for matters against him as hath been used against 
me, may for a time seem foul, especially in a time when 
greatness is the mark, and accusation is the game. And 
if this be to be a Chancellor, I think if the great seal lay 
upon Hounslow Heath, nobody would take it up. But 
the King and your lordship will, I hope, put an end to 
these my straits, one way or other. And, in troth, that 
which I fear most is, lest continual attendance and 
business, together with these cares, and want of time to 
do my weak body right this spring by diet and physic, 
will cast me down ; and that it will be thought 4 feigning 
or fainting/ But I hope in God I shall hold out. God 
prosper you!” 

Possibly his lordship goes home to write this very letter ; 
but he will protest his innocence to the last. Not where 
it is useless, to Sir Humphrey May, but to Villiers, where 
it will avail. He will still hold to his clean hands and 
clean heart—still to the King swear his love and duty. 
But inasmuch as Bacon has always a cunning plea, when 
in danger—that he is going to die, has not long to live, 
which plea is scattered up and down his letters whenever 
there is an office to get, or a place to win, so now he 
fears his health will give way. Presently he will be very 
ill, conveniently so, when his delinquencies are discovered. 

On the 19th of March, when all is discovered, he will use 
the very same words, “ feigning or fainting,” and declare 
that he is neither one nor the other. On the 18th of 
March, the third declaration of grievances concerning 
gold and silver thread is brought forward. Lord Bacon 
himself opens the matter. First, he has to deal with the 
patents; second, with the offenders; third, with the 
punishment of these offenders. 


478 


TEMPORARY DELAY. 


But the Chancellor is not driven to his corner yet. 
Lord Spencer moves that the abusers of the patents be 
taken into custody. Southampton follows with a motion 
that the grievances be divided into three heads, and three 
separate committees appointed, each committee to examine 
the execution of one patent, and that the witnesses might 
be sworn. 

His lordship seizes on this, and tries a device, as 
some think in the commons, “ to breed a jar ” between 
them. Many members of the lower house are witnesses 
in the upper house. It is not usual to swear members 
in committee, and this conference is upon committee 
of both houses. If the lords declare for swearing the 
Commons, they will resist. Bacon therefore seconds the 
rash motion, with this addition, “that the oath is to 
be given publicly in the house; for that it could not be 
administered in a committee.” As he expects, the device 
succeeds. The next day is consumed in an empty discus¬ 
sion as to the way of taking the oath, and precedents are 
searched, and law quoted, to prove the matter, just as we 
see the trail diverted, and the old dogs led off the scent, 
in the Commons of to-day. The Commons are, however, 
so much in earnest that though the proceeding is unusual, 
and against law, and against reason, as Coke shows, 
some of their members will consent to be sworn, so that 
the business do not stop. This ruse failing, his lordship, 
the Chancellor, falls, just as he feared he would, and as he 
predicted, suddenly ill. Nay, as he is in great straits, 
and Monpesson has fled, and Mitchel is in the Tower, 
and bribery is even a worse offence than these, he will be 
suddenly at the point of death, not merely indisposed, 


A CONVENIENT SICKNESS. 


479 


but like to die. Here is his letter of the 19th to the 
Lords:— 

“ I humbly pray your Lordships all to make a favour¬ 
able and true construction of my absence. It is no 
4 feigning or fainting,’ but sickness both of my heart and 
of my back, though joined with that comfort of mind that 
persuadeth me that I am not far from heaven, whereof I 
feel the first fruits.” 

What a noble possession is a good conscience ! How 
trebly armed is he, who is encased in that armour of proof! 
who feels that he is fit for heaven! How resigned and 
Christian will be his lordship’s ending! The balmy airs 
from another sphere float down upon him; he feels 
already the first fruits of another state. But although 
he is going to die;—he will lose no legal advantage. 

“ Whether I live or die, I would be glad to preserve 
my honour and fame, so far as I am worthy, hearing that 
some complaints of base bribery are coming before your 
Lordships.” He requests that they will not be prejudiced 
against him unheard; that because “ I have sequestered 
my mind at this time in great part from worldly matters, 
thinking of my account and answers in a higher court, 
your Lordships will give me convenient time, according 
to the course of other courts, to advise with my counsel 
and “ that I may be allowed to examine on oath the wit¬ 
nesses, and cross-examine themand if petitions increase, 
their Lordships are not to be deterred by any number or 
muster of them against a judge that makes two thousand 
orders and decrees in a year, especially as they have 
been hunted out against him. 

On the fifteenth, on the very day that Bacon tried the 


480 THE CHANCELLOR FLUNG OVERBOARD. 

ruse of the oath in the upper house, Sir Robert Phillips 
made a report from his committee, which had been ap¬ 
pointed to examine into the courts of justice, to the lower 
house. “ He then proceeded to accuse the Lord Chancellor 
of corruption, and opened the nature of the evidence to 
prove; but as this will appear much clearer in the trial 
of the Lord Chancellor before the Lords, we shall postpone 
it till then.” * He spoke of him “ as a man excellently 
well endowed with all parts of nature and art; of whom 
he could not speak much, because he could not speak 
enough. On the 18th, the Commons ask a conference on 
this matter specially with the upper house. On the 19th, 
the King proposes to adjourn the house till the 10th of 
April, no doubt at Bacon’s instance, though of this no proof 
on either side exists. It had been usual to adjourn about 
this time; but an adjournment in the midst of so much 
pressing business for so long a time was not quite usual. 
But on this 19th, the King shows his inability to defend 
his Chancellor, not from lack of will, but lack of strength. 
By his Secretary of State he declares “ that he was very 
sorry a person so much advanced by him, and sitting in 
so high a place, should be suspected. That he cannot 
answer for all others under him, though his care in the 
choice of judges had been great ” (as we have seen), “ but 
if this accusation should be proved, his Majesty would 
punish him to the full.” He will grant a commission 
under the great seal to examine all upon oath that can 
speak in this business ; the commissioners to be six of the 
Lords, and twelve of the Commons. 

The house does not adjourn, but prefers sitting on. 

* ‘ Parliamentary History/ 1209. 


DISSATISFIED SUITOES. 


481 


Witnesses might be removed or tampered with, members 
threatened or imprisoned; so it proceeds. The next day, 
March 20th, all is exposed. 

As we, who have been behind the scenes, have known 
all through, Bacon is an unjust judge. He has defrauded 
the widow and the orphan. He has polluted the sacred 
altar of justice. He has not merely pandered to a favourite 
of the King in his decisions, but he has taken a bribe from 
the very persons whom, at that favourite’s instance, he has 
favoured. The cases that rise are innumerable. Petitions 
pour in from all parts of the country. From amid the 
“ muster,” to use his own word, twenty-three are selected 
to proceed on. These will be sufficient; more would 
encumber affairs. 

As long back as 1619, John Wraynham was punished 
for impugning the Chancellor’s honesty, and condemned 
to imprisonment for life, a fine of one thousand pounds, 
standing in the pillory, and loss of his ears. Bacon 
had given a decision directly opposite to Egerton’s in the 
same matter. To-day we cannot decide whether honestly 
or not. In the absence of proof of bribery, Wraynham’s 
was an illegal offence. On this ground Coke voted in 
the council for his punishment. The severity of its 
penalty was happily remitted, at Bacon’s instance. In 
May of the preceding year, we find Lady Blount accusing 
the Chancellor. For this she suffered several months’ 
imprisonment. Lord Clifton and Lord Ormond, we have 
already seen, have been guilty of similar offences. 

In February, 1621, the Grocers’ and Apothecaries’ 
Company petition. Egerton had during his life refused to 
seal their patent, as it contained several illegal clauses. It 

Y 


482 petitions’ too numerous to get through. 


raises the price of drugs. The petitioners declare it ob¬ 
tained by indirect means, and supply a detail of the reasons 
why it ought not to have been conferred. This, as we have 
seen, is the petition referred to by Bacon in his letter to 
May. As far back as April, two years ago, Chamberlain, 
writing to Dudley Carleton the news of the court, says 
the Lord Chancellor’s slackness causes a rumour that he 
is to have a Lord Keeper for his coadjutor.* In June 
of the same year, when Lady Blount attacks the same 
august power, she is told “ it was just, but full of 
danger.”*)* In the year 1621, pending the inquiry against 
Bacon, here is some of the news of the time by a contem¬ 
porary : “ There are a thousand petitioners daily 

attending about the parliament house, but cannot be 
heard till the matter of monopolies be ended. My 
Lord Chancellor hath many bills put up against him, 
and he is said to have made a very peremptory speech to 
the committee, wherein was this passage, ‘ that he won¬ 
dered how the lower house would or dared go about 
to question his person or honour.’ ” Chamberlain writing 
to Carleton again, March 24th, says that the petitions 
against Bacon are too numerous to be got through. His 
chief friends and brokers of bargains, Sir George Hastings, 
Sir Strickland Young, and others attacked are obliged to 
accuse him in their own defence, though very reluctantly.” J 
On the 31st, the same correspondent adds; “The news of 
my Lord Chancellor continues much after (of the same 
kind) that I wrote before. . . . But it is added that Black, 
with Field, Bishop of LlandafF, is in likewise, for being my 

* Chamberlain to Carleton, April 24, 1619, in State Paper Office. 

f Ibid., Letter of June 12,1619. £ Ibid. 


THE CHANCELLOR INDISPOSED. 


483 


Lord Chancellors broker for bribes, and a letter of his 
shows where he undertakes to my lord verbo sacerdotis.” * 

These rascalities of Verulam are only part of the 
general system. The State Paper Office is full of grants 
to various people, minions of the court, to enrich the 
Villiers’. But the people is rising, angrily and in wrath, 
and will overthrow them all. This is but the beginning. 
Bacon, Bennet, Yelverton, Montagu, are now aimed at. 
Lionel Cranfield will go. Then Buckingham will be im¬ 
peached. Fortunately an assassin’s knife will save him a 
disastrous trial. 

This is the effect of a parliament. Bacon feared and 
foresaw it nearly all. In his speech in the Chancery last 
October he tried to accommodate the public mind to a 
subsidy, without a parliament, in hope that the evil might 
have been staved off. If the King had taken his advice, it 
might have been done without. Once he was for parlia¬ 
ments, but then he wanted place, and was a great orator 
in the lower house. Now he is a Peer, and is likely to be 
attainted for bribery. He would have preferred no par¬ 
liament. 

Bacon still shams illness. Yelverton, on the 18th of 
April, is called before the house, and charged with com¬ 
mitting men falsely to prison; with issuing warrants, 
unsigned, to be used against persons, called “ warrants 
dormant,” by which any person could be committed to 
prison without an offence committed. That he had 
advised the gold-thread patent. That he had issued more 
than three thousand “ Quo Warrantos ” to the patent of 

* Mead to Stukeville. See also letter of March 24 for some of the 
scandal of the court. 

Y 2 


484 THE grocers’ and apothecaries’ bribes. 

inns, and not ten came to trial. That he commences suits 
in the Exchequer which he has never prosecuted. 

Poor Sir Henry is in a bad plight. Villiers has long 
wanted him out of the way, to sell the place to another. 
Bacon, to serve his patron of lives complained of, once 
persuaded the King that Yelverton had passed four patents 
which were very inconvenient. So that the King wished 
himself to get rid of him. No chance occurred till the 
case Bacon discovered of the charter of the City of Lon¬ 
don. For that, to Villiers’ satisfaction, he was deprived 
of his place and imprisoned. But no sooner out of this 
trouble, he is charged again with other criminal acts, this 
time not against the King, but the people. He pleads 
naturally “ that he was the weakest ” among those who 
advised the Monpesson contract; but it is of no avail. 

Sir John Bennet, judge of the Prerogative Court of 
Canterbury, has been dismissed the Commons, and is now, 
like Bacon, charged with bribery. Yelverton makes a 
pitiful and moving appeal, showing that it was his opposi¬ 
tion to Buckingham in the matter of patents that was the 
cause of his first imprisonment, and loss of office, and fine, 
and that now he is brought to answer for the very act he 
so strenuously opposed. 

Sir Humphrey May, Chancellor of the Duchy, is on 
that committee. After his fall, Francis Verulam writes to 
him on the subject. Here is his letter:— 

“ Good Mr. Chancellor,— 

“ There will come upon Friday before you, a patent 
of his Majesty's for the separation of the Company of 
Apothecaries from the Company of Grocers. It is, as I 
conceive, a fair business both for law and convenience. 


THE JEST OF THE ACHING HEART. 


485 


and a work which the King made his own, and did, and as 
I hear doth take, much to heart. It is in favorem vitae, 
where the other part is in favorem lucri . You may 
perhaps think me partial to apothecaries that have been 
ever puddling in physic all my life.” 

This is very grim pleasantry of Francis Verulam. 
One sees well enough the aching heart, for never was 
there a more transparent attempt, to seem merry or force 
a smile. He wishes to make it appear a trifle. There is 
the old stroke of duplicity however. The King “ doth , as 
I hear, take this fair business much to heart.” He is 
wincing—but proceeds:— 

“ There is a circumstance that touches upon me, but 
post diem , for it is comprehended in the charge and 
sentence passed upon me. It is true that after I had put 
the seal to the patent, the apothecaries presented me with 
a hundred pounds. It was no judicial affair. But how¬ 
soever, as it may not be defended, so I were glad it were 
not raked up more than needs. I doubt only the chair 
(Coke), because I hear he useth names sharply; and 
besides, it may be he hath a tooth at me yet, which is 
not fallen out with age. But the best is, as one saith, 
Satis est lapsos non erigere; urgere vero jacentes, aut 
prsecipitantes impellere, certe est inhumanun. Mr. Chan¬ 
cellor, if you will be nobly pleased to grace me upon this 
occasion, by showing tenderness of my name and com¬ 
miseration of my fortune, there is no man in that assembly 
from whose mouth I had rather it should come. I hope 
it will be no dishonour to you. It will oblige me much, 
and be a uniting point of our last reintegrade of friend¬ 
ship. I rest 

“ Your faithful Friend to do your service.” 

Twenty-three cases are proved against Bacon. Through¬ 
out the proceedings, so guilty does he know himself, that 
he declines to appear. On the 30th of April he sends, 


486 


THE ACCUSED PLEADS GUILTY. 


however, an acknowledgment of his offences to the lords, 
praying for mercy. 

“ Upon advised consideration of the charge, descending 
into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account 
as far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess 
that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all 
defence, and put myself on the grace and mercy of your 
Lordships.”* 

He then proceeds to deal seriatim with every one of 
the twenty-three cases, and pleads guilty to all. " For 
extenuation,” he concludes, “ I will use none concern¬ 
ing the matters themselves; only it may please your 
lordships, out of your nobleness, to cast your eyes of com¬ 
passion upon my person and estate.” He then proceeds 
to excuse himself that there be no cases, more than two 
years old. An evasion, as the Egerton case is of much 
longer standing, and to pray leniency and mercy as 
he is very poor. On its being read before the lords, 
they appoint a committee of twelve of their number to 
go to the Chancellor and demand if his hand is the hand 
which signed it, and if he is prepared to stand by his 
signature. His answer to the committee was, “ My 
lords, it is my act, my hand, and my heart: I beseech 
your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed.”t Which 
report being made, it was agreed by the house to move 
his Majesty to sequestrate the seals, and to entreat his 
Highness the prince that he would be pleased to do this. 

It must not, however, be supposed that Bacon’s con¬ 
fession was obtained from him without effort, or spon¬ 
taneously. Such proceeding would not have been con- 
* ‘ Parliamentary History,’ 1244. f Ibid. 1247. 


FAWNS UPON THE KING AND HIS JUDGES. 487 

sistent with his nature. To temporise and scheme, to 
jump from point to point, till finally brought down by the 
hunter, is his system of action. On the 24th of the same 
month he had sent an admission of his guilt, so craftily 
framed, and so obscured by metaphor and historic illus¬ 
tration, that it was hardly clear from it whether Bacon 
was an injuring or an injured person—a martyr or a saint. 
It suggested that the seal should be taken from him and 
given to the King. “ Your lordships will be pleased to 
behold your chief pattern the King, our sovereign, a 
King of incomparable clemency, and whose heart is in¬ 
scrutable for wisdom and goodness; and your lordships 
will remember there sat not these hundred years before 
(since Henry VII.) a Prince in your house; and never 
such a prince, whose presence deserveth to be made 
memorable by records and acts mixed of mercy and 
justice. Yourselves are either nobles, and compassion 
ever beateth in the veins of noble blood, or reverend 
prelates, who are the servants of Him that would not 
‘ break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax.’ ” 
He suggests that his questioning will have the same effect 
as his punishment, for the questioning of men in eminent 
places hath the same severe terror, though not the same 
rigour, with the punishment. “ Neque minus firmata est 
disciplina militaris periculo Q.uinti Maximi, quam misera- 
bili supplicio Titi Manlii.” 

But neither his art nor his artifice availed. Now the 
Lords and Commons are at last, a little too far advanced 
to be treated with words and promises. Flattery will do 
much, but though it will dull the edge of punishment, it 


488 THE LAST POINT OF DEFENCE ABANDONED. 

will not destroy the verdict. The unbounded adulation 
of the King, that he exceeds in wisdom even Elizabeth, 
is a masterly cover to his retreat, and, as we shall see, 
will be efficacious beyond measure. But even flattery of 
the poor pedant cannot work miracles. 

With the country madly excited from end to end, it 
will hardly suffice to let so capital an offender escape. It 
was therefore resolved, “ That the Lord Chancellors 
submission was not satisfactory, for that his confession 
therein was not fully nor particularly set down, but did 
in some sort extenuate it, and seemed to prescribe the 
sentence to be given against him by the House.” 

Driven from point to point—So conscience-stricken that 
he dare not face the house—So overwhelmed by his own 
guiltiness that he cannot answer but by confession—So 
conscious that these cases proved are but an infinitesimal 
part of the grand sum total of corruption, to be charged 
against him ; Bacon will no longer fight. 

If a point was to be gained by craft, by audacity, by 
dissimulation or violence, by threat or by adulation, he would 
have maintained it. But the fortress of his high honour 
and dignity, on which he had so long stood, was no longer 
tenable. A very full and a very entire confession, so as to 
secure the favour of the court, is the only step left. When 
everything is absolutely proved, then the plea of guilty, 
and the full confession, are graceful acts. He will make 
them. It will save further search, further proof. So 
he acknowledges, as we have shown, explicitly, but with 
palliation and subterfuge where they are possible, the 
twenty-three cases brought against him. 


THE CASES OF BRIBERY PROVED. 489 


They are as follows :— 


That in the cause of Sir Rowland, against Sir Edward 
Egerton, his lordship received from Sir Rowland 


before he decreed for him ..... 300 

Hodie and Hodie, jewelled buttons, valued • . 50 

Lady Wharton.310 

For Monk, Jevon, and Young’s cases, each £100 . 300 

Fisher.106 

Kenday and Valore. Bribes of both sides. Kenday . 800 

Valore, as a loan ....... 2000 

Scot and Lenthall, both sides.—Of Scot . . • 200 

Lenthall.100 

For Booth, Peacock, and Dukes’ cases . . • 400 

Of Sir Ralph Hunsbye ...... 500 


Of Lord Montaine, with promises of more at end of 


case.£600 or 700 

Reynell and Peacock—both sides—Reynell £700 or 800 
Peacock ........ 100 

Of Barber. ....... 700 

Of the Grocers and Apothecaries—both sides—Grocers 200 

Apothecaries, besides a rich present of ambergris . 150 

Of the French merchants, to constrain the Vintners of 
London to take 1500 tuns of wine; to accomplish 
which he used very indirect means, by colour of his 
office and authority, without bill or other suit de¬ 
pending, as threatening and imprisoning the Vint¬ 


ners, for which he received of the merchants . . 1000 


Lastly. That he had given way to great exactions by 
his servants in respect of private seals and sealing in¬ 
junctions. 

To all these charges he confessed separately and 
distinctly. They amount, as will he seen, to a very large 
sum in those days, equivalent, accepting the relative 
value of money in that day and in our own, to nearly one 
hundred thousand pounds. 

In certain cases, it will be seen, he took bribes of both 
sides, which, when they were equal, might have tended to 

y 3 




490 


lady wharton’s case. 


equalize the decision. But it can hardly be doubted 
that so long as one suitor was wealthier, his case would 
fare the best. In Valore’s case he borrowed two 
thousand pounds: this was the same Valore to whom he 
has declared he owed 20,000?., which he wished the King 
to forgive. He now refers to that letter, and alleges it 
was but two thousand that he owed, and that he con¬ 
sidered himself indebted in that sum, as the two loans 
now charged as bribes. 

The evidence of the various bribes in their nakedness, 
even measured by his extenuation, looks hideous enough. 
Thus we find in Lady Wharton’s cause, he first took a 
purse of money, but that her suit still languished, but 
receiving 200?. more, “ her decree had life.” But this 
was not sufficient. Shute, one of Bacon’s servants in the 
courts, suggests that she shall make over the estate in 
suit, to Lord Bacon, preserving a life interest to herself, 
to the disinheritance of her children. This monstrous 
proposal she refuses; and, by consequence, not only loses 
her suit, but her 300?., which is the cause of her present 
petition. But then, not without further aggravation. 
For obtaining two hundred pounds more, Bacon decreed 
for her. Afterwards damning his own decree, by which 
another two hundred pounds, the expense and misery of 
a second suit were added to her first loss. 

It may be well to endeavour to laud and honour 
Bacon’s private character. It is very cheap praise. It 
is very easy to honour one who has been no cause of suffer¬ 
ing to ourselves. It merely requires a lack of perception 
of virtue, of respect for integrity, of a sense of the distinc¬ 
tion between right and wrong. But can it be believed that 


CHEAP VENERATION FOR GENIUS. 


491 


the unhappy and wretched suitors, tortured and ruined by 
Bacon’s prodigality, that he may send his servants to 
court with gold buttons,* and clad like ambassadors, 
would have accorded to him this praise ? Is there to be 
no distinction henceforth between vice and virtue ? Is 
justice not a sacred inheritance, as sacred, as inestimable 
as liberty itself? Is the lamp of truth placed on high, 
for man’s maintenance and protection, no longer the object 
of his sacred care ? Finally, are we at liberty to falsify 
facts, or confound truth, to serve an ignoble theory or a 
base motive ? 

Shall any tenth-rate literary charlatan, to make a repu¬ 
tation for being marvellously astute, for being wiser than 
great historians, so corrupt history, so falsify the chronicles, 
so pervert evidence, that we shall cease to execrate what 
is infamous, or revere what is sincerely worthy of honour ? 
May the just heavens forbid! Shall he be at liberty to- 
play tricks, alter dates, pervert the facts, bring false 
charges against individuals, coin occurrences, that he may 
sell books ? 

The unhappy suitors, whom this voluptuous Sybarite 
destroyed and made wretched, are not with us. But if 
we have no reverence for truth or justice abstractedly, 
we surely have pity and. regard for the victims of his op¬ 
pression, for the miserable wretches ruined by his pro¬ 
digality. Slaughtered in estate that he might squander. 
Made forlorn that he might outshine his neighbours in the 
grandeur of his processions, in his almost regal state, his 
equipages, and his retinue of servants ? The Cry of the 
orphan, destitute, penniless, flung upon the streets—Of the 
* Letter, Marcli 24, 1621, State Paper Office. 


492 


THE EGEETONS’ CASE. 


widow, flung from affluence into penury—Of the strong man 
bowed down and heartbroken—Of the mother deprived of 
her children’s all,—shall they not go up as a prayer to 
heaven, to invoke fire down, to consume the wretched 
idolater of a base creed ? To punish the infamous polluter 
of a sacred religion and a holy altar ? 

Bacon falls. His vile associate in sin, the Bishop of 
Llandaff, being a bishop, is, for the honour of his cloth, 
not punished, merely admonished in convocation. The 
House of Commons has no power to deal with him, he 
being an ecclesiastic, and the Church is merciful to 
its erring son, not in pity, but to avoid scandal. He, 
in the cause of Egerton, had, in addition to the money 
received by Bacon, demanded a bribe of 6000 marks (to 
be guaranteed by a bond for 10,000 marks). Egerton 
could not raise so vast a sum, therefore Llandaff* proposed 
that the decree should be made in Egerton’s favour, and 
then raised out of the land so obtained, promising in 
verbo sacerdotis , on the faith of a priest, on the word of 
a bishop, that he would cancel the bond for 10,000 
marks if the decree were not made in his favour. To 
justify the decree, and shift the responsibity from Bacon’s 
shoulders, it was further agreed that a petition should 
be made to Buckingham and to the King to interfere 
in favour of the bribers. But, unfortunately, Villiers and 
the King, unwilling to be the catspaws, both refuse on 
this occasion. The decree therefore is against the 
Egertons. But the bishop refuses to deliver up the bond 
for 10,000 marks—hence their petition. 

An attempt has been made to juggle the public into 
the belief that a man of infamous character, Churchill, 


THE WITNESSES AGAINST BACON. 


493 


was the chief, if not the only witness in these cases. The 
witnesses are brought in by dozens. Churchill is one of 
a hundred. He is important and useful, for he was once 
a servant under Bacon, and can therefore speak as to 
specific acts in corroboration. It is easy to show bribery, 
but it is very difficult indeed to show Bacon’s complicity, 
to bring every present precisely home. It is not at all 
difficult to show the wretched extortions practised, but it 
is a matter of much more intricacy to trace every gift to 
a dependent home to the Chancellor. To get behind the 
scenes and fathom the mystery of where the money goes 
to. Churchill, as one of Bacon’s servants, can help in 
this, but he is only one of the aids. For the state of his 
character justice cannot be too nice in that particular. If 
the dishonest Aid not disagree, or if all testimony from 
persons of dubious virtue were refused, difficulty would 
exist in securing punishment at all. His character, how¬ 
ever, is not impeachable on the historic evidence pre¬ 
sented, as that is an ex-parte accusation. But it is hardly 
probable that a very virtuous man would undertake his 
task. 

As an answer to the proposition that the whole of this 
trial was a move of Villiers and Coke to expel Bacon little 
need be urged. It is as competent to show that Redpath 
and Robson were the victims of a political faction; that 
Lord Palmerston, being in league with Redpath, was 
by Lord John Russell overthrown through Robson. To 
heighten the narrative, Mr. Palmer, Mr. Cook, and Sir 
Fitzroy Kelly all assisting in the plot, would make the 
history more interesting and equally intelligible. A 
history of our own time, after showing us that Mr. Edwin 


494 THE CRIMES THAT PULLED HIM DOWN. 

James took Capri, having visited Italy somewhere about 
that time, and that Lord Elgin, from entering China 
somewhere in the same century, conquered at Chilian- 
wallah, would be equally instructive—and probable. 

The facts were, Bacon was in friendly and amicable cor¬ 
respondence with Yilliers after the inquiry into the abuses 
of the law courts commenced, and remained throughout in 
correspondence with the King. The favourite, who knew 
him, found that he had actually been taking bribes of 
the suitors he had recommended. That he had played 
him false again. He did not withdraw his countenance 
altogether. This he feared to do, for the Lord Verulam 
had a pen and wrote history; but he would not, he 
dared not, assist him openly. Even he had trembled 
for his place. He had handed over, or professed to 
hand over, his brothers to justice. They had fled. Sir 
John Bennet, Yelverton, Mitchel, Monpesson, were all 
punished. He was not powerful enough to save Bacon, 
nor, indeed, why should he ? He did not move in any way 
against him. 

Bacon, ‘throughout, acknowledged the justice of his 
sentence. Thrice repeated his confession. Never charged 
any one with plotting against him—that plea was re¬ 
served for the nineteenth century. 

If Bacon could have used such a defence, would he 
not have employed it ? 

The Chairman of the Committee of Grievances plotting 
with Yilliers to overthrow Bacon, for the vile purpose of 
bringing in Williams as Lord Chancellor, another in¬ 
genious surmise, is equal to the proposition that Lord 
Palmerston plotted with Palmer to bring in the Bishop of 


THE ACT OF THE COMMONS. 


495- 


Jerusalem as member for Middlesex—as historically pro¬ 
bable. 

A letter exists of March 21st, in which the guilty Chan¬ 
cellor prays to Villiers to check Coke in the prosecution; 
proving that Bacon and Villiers are still in friendly inter¬ 
course, and which proves, moreover, his entire confidence 
in the favourite. It contains this passage : “ I find that 
building upon your Lordship’s favourable nature and friend¬ 
ship, I have built upon the rocks, where neither wind nor 
waves can cause overthrow.’' But what can a poor crea¬ 
ture of the King do, against a great and justly enraged 
people ? Even Villiers himself will fall. 

But presuming Coke leagued with Villiers, would their 
league coerce the whole opinion and judgment of both 
houses? would it falsify the verdict? would it compel 
Bacon’s confession ? would it suborn hundreds of witnesses, 
and procure thousands of petitions, and that without 
movement on the part of the principals ? nay, not merely 
without movement, but with actual discountenance, for 
Coke, acting as chairman of the committee, actually 
rejects evidence bearing against his enemy. So much 
greater is his love of justice than his animosity, and 
Villiers, unfriendly to Coke, is throughout acknowledged 
by Bacon as one of his greatest friends. 

To make such a position tenable, we must suppose the 
House of Commons entirely out of existence. To the 
very end of Villiers’ life there is nothing to impeach the 
even tenour of his friendship for his servant. After the 
Chancellor’s ruin, he is the object of many letters, of 
nearly all the petitions and communications addressed for 
money, or pardon, or place, to the King. 


496* 


THE PENALTY AND ITS REMISSION. 


But the temerity which can dare to dispute a crime con¬ 
fessed, with every circumstance of aggravation, fully and 
explicitly, to avoid further exposure, and which is punished 
by sentence of two houses of parliament, will dare much. 
Bacon was fined 40,000£, but through the King’s friend¬ 
ship, the fine was remitted—was committed to the Tower 
during the King’s pleasure, hut was released the following 
day; the rest of his sentence, that he shall by this 
sentence be rendered incapable of public employment, 
nor sit in parliament, is the only part enforced. His 
confreres in iniquity, Monpesson, and Mitchel, and Sir 
John Bennet are dealt with more hardly, hut he for the 
rest of his life is free to go where and whither he pleases, 
only prevented from further injury to the state and violation 
of her laws. 


THE RULE OF MODERATION NOT INFALLIBLE. 497 


CHAPTER XXII. 

We have traced now through many chapters the career of 
this wonderful man, with as little severity as is possible, to 
a sincere detestation of crime and cunning; of mingled 
baseness and perfidy; of tyranny and servility ; cowardice 
and cruelty ; protestation of virtue and active malignity; 
of deadly hypocrisy and fawning flattery. The world 
resents extremes. The picture I have drawn, altogether 
beyond my own control, out of indisputable materials, 
can hardly find favour. For a large portion of the world 
believes implicitly that truth lies between extremes, and 
so judicially decides on all points submitted to their judg¬ 
ment, by generally convenient maxims;—That middle 
courses are safest, and that moderate counsels are wisest. 
Yet in spite of such axiomatic wisdom, it is clear that 
there are occasionally criminals who are amenable to no 
such rules. Who astound the world by their sins. Who 
distance all comprehension and even belief. Who, for the 
most paltry and inadequate motives, or for advantages so 
small as to be incomprehensible or ridiculous in extenua¬ 
tion, commit the most detestable crimes. 

Bacon was no such man. He had “ vast contemplative 


498 


INTELLECT WITHOUT PRINCIPLE. 


ends ” and manifest advantage always before him. His 
motive was self, his end was ambition. Whether he had 
any real settled or religious belief, it is not my wish to 
inquire. He professed piety, but this may have been like 
some other of his protestations, part of his art. He pro¬ 
fessed to reverence and worship the King, while all men 
endowed with honesty and true feeling turned from the 
slobbering, pitiful pedant, if not with ill-concealed disgust 
and aversion, with silence and contempt. He was ready 
to beslaver majesty infinitely. In the same way he may 
have professed piety. 

If he is to be judged by fruits, no single act of his life 
betokens sincere belief. None of his writings prove a 
deep or inherent reverence for the truths of the New 
Testament as truths, or disclose a perception of their 
intrinsic and marvellous significance. 

He was as godless and astute as Richard the Third; as 
much a relier on his own intellect, as much unprincipled, 
as little swayed or swerved, by tender ties of duty or affec¬ 
tion, love or remorse, pity or love, charity or faith, truth 
or justice. So he fell—his very plans overthrowing him, 
his vices his own scourge. Had he allowed Coke to pass 
into the upper house, had he been content to sit in the 
lower, he might still have avoided retribution and pro¬ 
longed it, till death would save him. But it were idle to 
speculate on this. His crimes and his fate are alike 
upon him, and it remains for the honest but to know, 
“ to ponder and to learn,” from his crimes and fate, how 
the most splendid attributes, the noblest intellectual gifts, 
are not incompatible with the basest nature, and the most 
degrading profligacy. The moral is neither original nor 


A CONSCIENCE THAT KNOWS NOT KEBUKE. 499 


new. It has been verified by a thousand examples, and 
only comes to swell the roll more pointedly and sig¬ 
nificantly, and perhaps even more unquestionably than 
before. 

On the second day of May the House of Lords—the 
King having previously sequestered the seals—appointed 
the following day for sentence. The Chancellor was 
summoned to appear before them. He pleaded that he 
was still sick, protesting that he feigned it not for an 
excuse. The same evening of the 3rd, Bacon writes, 
being in nowise too ill for that, to the King “ to save him 
from them ; to let the cup pass from himand moreover 
prays that the seals only be taken from him, and the rest 
of his sentence commuted. 

i This could not be done without fear of arousing the 
already enraged and outraged people. The sentence was, 
however, deprived of its chief severity. On May 31st, 
still protesting that he was never author of “any im¬ 
moderate counsel to the King” (not even in Peacham 
and Peacock’s cases ?), that he was a “ trusty, honest, 
and Christ-loving friend ” to the King; “ and howsoever I 
acknowledge the sentence just, and for reformation sake 
fit,” declares himself “the justest Chancellor that hath 
been in the five changes since Sir Nicholas Bacon’s times.” 
An undeniable slander on Egerton and his predecessors. 

That Bacon’s offence is not to be judged by the high 
standard of judicial purity in modern times is true. He in 
some sort conformed to the usage of the day; but he was 
undeniably the greatest offender. He was not so venal or 
vile, perhaps, as Buckingham, but then it was his duty 
to be purer. It was his office to be just. Sir John 


500 


THE WORST CRIMINAL. 


Bennet was but his follower. No charge has ever been 
brought or could be brought and maintained against 
Coke. Had Bacon been but as honest, despite the 
wretchedness of the monarch, the tide of profligacy might 
have been stemmed; but in lending himself to Buck¬ 
ingham’s courses, he of necessity, that should by age, by 
experience, by his high office, have hindered him, became 
a worse offender. 

Buckingham was a mere boy when Bacon lent himself 
to him as his tool. But while there is proof of his com¬ 
plicity in the matter of patents, there is none in the matter 
of bribes. There are strong reasons to suppose, however, 
that he was amenable to such a charge. But public 
opinion attaches greater criminality to a judge’s than a 
favourite’s venality—not improperly. The one is sworn 
to execute justice, to maintain truth. Bacon hints at the 
minion’s participation: “ they were not the greatest of¬ 
fenders upon whom the wall fellwhich may mean that 
Bacon had divided his spoil with Buckingham and the 
King, or that Bacon himself did not regard bribery as so 
great a crime as the Monpesson patents, which, consider¬ 
ing their iniquity, is likely enough. 

On the 1st of June, or probably on the day of his im¬ 
prisonment, as Camden says, Bacon was liberated. The 
punishment proving that the same abhorrence did not attach 
to the offence the infamy which it would to-day—and went 
to the house of Sir John Vaughan, from which he wrote the 
same evening to the Prince of Wales, desiring him to thank 
Sir John, the prince’s servant—“the sweet air and loving 
usage “of whose house hath already much revived my 
languishing spirits.” On the 4th he is again soliciting 


ELASTICITY OF TEMPEE. 


501 


for place to the King: “ Your Majesty, that did shed tears 
in the beginning of my trouble, will, I hope, then shed the 
dew of your grace and goodness upon me in the end. 
Let me live to serve you, else life is but the shadow of 
death —and at the same time to Buckingham, “ that 
adversity hath neither spent nor pent my spirits.” This 
is what Milton has termed the unconquerable spirit. He 
saw ignominy in the exposure, but he sees none in the 
act. He is as strong again as ever, neither deterred by 
the shame nor the iniquity of the offence. 

In July he perceives by his “noble and constant friend ” 
the Marquis, that your Majesty hath a gracious inclination 
toward me ; and instances that Demosthenes was banished 
for bribery of the highest nature, yet recalled with 
honour; that Marcus Livius was condemned for exactions, 
yet afterwards made consul and censor; Seneca, banished 
for divers corruptions, yet restored; and many more. 

If Bacon’s genius is subject to degradation, it will yet 
make infamy honourable, glorify shame, and he will still 
strew flowers of rhetoric over the tomb in which his virtue 
lies buried. 

Buckingham answers him: “ The hearty affection I 
have borne to your person and service hath made me 
ambitious to be a messenger of good news to you, and an 
eschewer of illand sending him three years’ advance 
of his pension from the crown—in all 3600?.; but whether 
in addition the three years’ advance of his grant from the 
Alienation Office does not appear. He moreover promises 
from the King some better testimony of his favour in 
future, worthier both of him and you. 

In September James remitted his fine, “ the public feel- 


502 CONSOLES HIMSELF WITH WRITING HISTORY. 

ing having a little blown over.” To prevent the creditors 
from receiving any benefit it was, at Bacon’s desire, 
assigned to four trustees, two of whom were judges, to be 
held for Bacon’s benefit. But that the king did really 
grant such remission is not clear. The words of the 
pardon dated October 17, exclude the fine for his recent 
offences. But even in this Bacon’s supereminent craft is 
shown. Williams, Lord Keeper, writes to complain (Oct. 
27), “ that his lordship (Bacon) was too cunning for me. 
He passed his fine (whereby he hath deceived his creditors) 
ten days before he presented his pardon to the seal. So 
as now in his pardon I find his parliament fine excepted, 
which he hath before the sealing of the same obtained 
and procured: and whether the house of parliament will 
not hold themselves mocked and derided with such an 
exception, I leave to your Majesty’s wisdom.” Whether 
this was in accordance with the King’s desire is not clear ; 
it is most probable that it was, and that James, intending 
to make as vast a reparation as he could or dare, arranged 
that the pardon and the relief of the fine should be passed 
together. 

At the King’s wish he leaves the neighbourhood of 
London, and retires to Gorhambury. Arrived at his 
ancestral home, he is so little disturbed by his fate, so 
blest is he in a good conscience and an untroubled mind, 
that he commences a work which is to bring him into 
fame, which he has often proposed to the King, which his 
Majesty mucn desires—a history of Henry the Seventh,* 

* “I have therefore chosen to write the life of King Henry the 
Seventh, who was in a sort your forerunner, and whose spirit, as well 
as his blood, is doubled upon your majesty.”—October 8,1621. 


THE MEANEST OF MANKIND. 


503 


the ancestor from whom James derives his title, and to 
whom Bacon indirectly alludes, when he declares his 
Majesty the wisest monarch that has reigned for a hundred 
years, viz., since Henry the Seventh’s death. In 1622 
this was published, and from this time till his death in 
1625, he devoted himself to the production of the 4 De 
Augments’ in Latin, as more likely to be permanent than 
his own tongue, with the assistance of Mr. Herbert, who 
translated it for him, and his History of Life and Death, 
4 Historia Vitae et Mortis.’ The 4 De Augmentis ’ was so 
enlarged that it might go for a new work. 44 It is a book, 
I Jhink, that will be enlarged, and be a citizen of the 
world, as English books are not.” Even here, however, 
his old craft is seen. He expunges the praise of Eliza¬ 
beth, which was contained in his first edition, written 
while she lived, as not likely to be pleasant to the 
King, and because gratitude had no place in Bacon’s 
vocabulary. 

We have traced this man through all his changing 
fortune from his birth to his fall, and as there is neither 
moral to point, nor tale to adorn by his life in exile from 
the court, we will here end it. 

Whatever may have been Bacon’s crimes—and I myself 
have in vain searched all history for his parallel in infamy 
—there can be no delight in tracing his career in misery. 
Not that it may be supposed, either his sufferings or his 
remorse were heavy upon him. But that his punishment 
was sufficiently consummated in the very act of his fall. 
His income was about 2,500?., sufficient for a private 
man. In his private life we can unfortunately feel little 


504 


STILL RUNS IN THE OLD TRACK. 


interest, being but imperfectly informed on it. His two 
or three servants, Meautys, Bushell, and Rawley, speak 
highly of his generosity. He seems ever to have been 
a kind and an indulgent master; but neither Rawley, 
Meautys, nor Bushell give us any authentic glimpses of 
his home. 

Rawley declares that he was happy with his wife. 
But this appears to have been false, both by the nature 
of the will, in which she is with circumstance ignominiously 
and pointedly excluded; and by repute, as shown by 
Wilson in his history. He never ceased to beg money 
of the King. To importune him for office. To send 
him flattering and fawning letters. To liken him to God 
in wisdom and power. Similarly he begged till the death 
of Buckingham. Consummating his last act of will and 
testament, by endowing a college, and leaving vast sums 
for noble purposes out of a bankrupt estate. But with all 
these hindrances either to our love or our respect, we have 
only to judge “ Manlius in sight of the Capitol;” only to 
read his works ; only to consider his wisdom and learning, 
to feel sadness that one so great and so gifted should have 
been so mean, or should have been compelled to what 
doubtless he felt so hard a lot, retirement; recollecting 
that, of no man of ancient or modern times, does so much 
damnatory evidence, perchance exist. That he has been 
peculiarly unfortunate in this circumstance. That almost 
every spring of villany that he ever touched now rises in 
judgment against him. That the life his correspondence 
affords is literal, and cannot be flattering; is severe, and 
cannot be softened. This may be illustrated. No man 


DEARTH OF LAW. 


505 


is satisfied with a mere photograph of himself—what is 
called an untouched picture. His friends see its truth. 
He cannot; there is something wanting. Yet is it no 
less exact if inevitably severe. 

Contrast the ideal and painted semblances of men 
with these products of nature—these inexorable facts. 
How poor does the reality seem! This is an image in 
point. The facts of Bacon’s life live. In their nakedness 
they supply a harsh and severe picture. They are true. 
Not the whole truth; but still much better than a merely 
imaginary product. 

Having alluded to an alleged conspiracy to overthrow 
Bacon, it remains only to notice one of its asserted con¬ 
ditions—that it was a fraud, to overthrow St. Albans and 
place Williams. This may be declared a happy invention, 
founded in part on a scandalous hypothesis. The seal 
was vacant from April to July. Bacon’s system had 
deprived the crown of good lawyers, of able judges. 
Bacon wanted tools, not justices, and when he lost the 
seals, there was no sufficient or fit man to take the place; 
neither Yelverton, nor Hobart, nor Coventry, nor Mon¬ 
tagu were adequate. There was at the time, however, a very 
able churchman, admitted to be a man of capable business 
faculty, of undoubted application, of unwearying assiduity, 
fully adapted for the post. James leaned to the civil law, 
he preferred the church to the law, because the ecclesiastics 
and priests had always been foremost in their race of 
servility. They had at all times been ready to declare 
him God’s vicegerent on earth. They paid him honours 
as a divinity. Dr. Cowel had exalted his prerogative 
beyond all stretch, and out-Heroded Herod, in his notions 


506 


bacon’s successor. 


of royal power and dignity. Therefore a churchman 
was in unison with the King’s views; but the matter re¬ 
mained for a long time undecided. It is, however, 
manifestly certain that if Williams had been the destined 
heir, he would have been placed at once, and a post so 
important would not have been held open so long. 

. It would appear singular that the strife to introduce 
an antique standard in law existed, as in the arts and in 
architecture; yet so it was. Attempts had been made 
to assimilate English to Roman law from the time of 
the Conquest. Some of our early lawyers, the great 
Chief Justice Fortescue among the number, were violently 
opposed to such a course. Bacon inclined, however, to 
this feeling. Some quotations from his advice in the 
choice of privy councillors might have been adduced in 
proof. 

Williams was, if Hacket is reliable, a noble man in 
private life. “ He was far more ready to give than 
take, to oblige than be beholding. Magis Mud laborare 
ut Mi quamplurimi debeant, as Sallust remarked of 
Jugurtha,” is his Biographer’s testimony. The King had 
always been inclined to the canon law. He preferred a 
churchman. Williams was indefatigable, pliant, and zea¬ 
lous. Villiers was under personal obligations to him in 
the matter of his courtship and marriage. And as to the 
base slanders insinuated, it is only fit to say that they are 
but slanders, to which facts at once give the lie. Williams 
attacked the Countess for changing her religion in the 
December of the year following; and she had then been 
in the hands of Fisher the Jesuit for many months. His 
dismissal arose from his superior virtue. He was not as 


bacon’s failure and success, similar in source. 507 

compliant as Bacon. He was very servile; but not servile 
enough. At the end of Trinity Term, viz., in May, 1624, 
he refused to seal a patent from Charles to Lord Conway. 
This roused that susceptible monarch’s ire. At the be¬ 
ginning of next term he was apprised that the King would 
have him dismissed. On the 25th of October he delivered 
up the seals. 

No man, equal in meanness to the great philosopher, 
could be found to succeed him. His post, therefore, fre¬ 
quently changed hands after his fall. Living in an evil 
age, he was equal to its worst requirements. He flourished 
for a long time, but retribution long delayed came full 
surely. Had he considered that 

“ Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do, 

Not light them for ourselves,” 

much of his career, and its attendant humiliations, 
might have been averted—some of his fame, but all his 
dishonour. He had presumed to wear “an undeserved 
dignity.” Had attempted to “ cozen fortune,” and seem 
honourable without the stamp of merit, and thus had 
tempted that doom and disgrace which it would be idle 
to declare he did not fully deserve. 


508 


THE FALL. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

Raleigh ends his story of the ‘History of the World’ 
with the moral that all the “ far-stretched greatness of 
man ” is covered in by the words hie jacet. The con¬ 
templation of a vast army, of which not one man would 
presently remain, is said to have conveyed the same pang 
of grief to Xerxes. Shakspere, in those pathetic lines 
from ‘ The Tempest,’implying that all the products of 
man’s restless ambition shall fade away like “ the baseless 
fabric of a vision,” conveys more fully, perfectly, and 
nobly the same truth. 

In the fall of Wolsey the great poet has indicated the 
pathos and personal suffering supplied in the fate which 
has now fallen on Bacon, of surviving the death of his 
proudest hopes. Henceforth, like Napoleon the Great, 
he is to suffer the fate of Prometheus. He is to be 
chained to a rock, with anger and cruel indignation 
preying on his heart. To suffer the worst fate which the 
fable of old time, or the history of the new presents. But 
he is not stricken down. He does not, like Napoleon, 
vent his spleen on those unhappy enough to be about 
him. He bears with him an amulet against the worst 


THE MOEAL. 


509 


malice of fortune—a “mind not to be changed by time 
or place which is its own vast empire. He has within 
him a philosophy which defies fate. 

Has he not moralized too, with Epictetus, “ Heri vidi 
fragilem frangi, hodie vidi mortalem mori ?” * “ That if 

a man’s mind be deeply seasoned with the consideration of 
the mortality and corruptible nature of things,” he will 
perceive the nothingness of all; and with this philosophy 
he falls back on his early studies. 

We, who have watched him ascend—who have seen 
with what care and diligence, with what assiduous labour 
and patience, he has wrought out his splendid career— 
have become partners in his fate. We must surely sym¬ 
pathise with the great man fallen, with the proud soul 
humbled. We have traced him from earth, watched him 
in his daring flight, borne up on unbated wing, till he be¬ 
came a mere speck, threading his precipitous pathway up 
through heaven; saw the flash of the bolt that struck him 
in mid career, and tumbled him headlong to earth. His 
fall has smitten us. We lay hands on him; he is breath¬ 
less, dizzy, but not dead. We turn bim over, with his 
face to the sun, and we see no maimed, crushed, broken 
man, but a man shaken, much wounded, but resolute, 
self-contained as before. He is a philosopher. 

But Bacon’s career, that looks so like a painless flight, 
was eminently one of labour. When he stood proudest, 
an image of happiness, in the Temple of Fortune herself, 
in the eyes of his wondering fellows, there were pangs 
that qualified all joy. Now men scrawl on the base 

* Implying in the original—“ Yesterday it was a glass broken, to-day 
it is a man dead.” 


510 


THE CAREER OF AMBITION. 


of his statue, shrined in the temple of its immortality, 
“ Ichabod/’ for its glory has departed. Pity is averse 
to pursue the theme. Shall we follow the beast stricken 
in the chase, as it drags itself wounded to its home, to 
die ? Surely not. The moral is told. Bacon was a foe 
to liberty, and has expiated the great offence. He was a 
traitor to his country, and has paid the penalty. His 
public history supplies the chief, though necessarily not 
the total, interest of his life. A private history, if it 
could have been obtained, would have had its value, too; 
hut no record exists of his domestic ties or sympathies. 
When he retired to Gorhambury he retired to scholarship 
and comparative seclusion. Henceforth a philosopher again. 
Like an eagle he has soared, has touched on every crag 
of human ambition within mortal vision, but he returns 
to the old nest to die. Everything about him suggests 
early associations and a different fate. This is his doom. 

It is a sorrowful story—a story old as the world, and 
that never grows older. There must be grief for him. For 
that dull, monotonous round of labour, which Pawley has 
described, unsweetened by domestic love, with one con¬ 
sciousness only—that a world is looking on as he sits at 
his desk. That the next generation, forgetting his errors, 
uninjured by his ambition, may pass leniently by his 
faults, thinking only of his splendid achievements. 

If Bacon’s gifts were more than human ; his flight and 
fall have been most human. His career was that of any dili¬ 
gent worker. He laboured and he prospered. His oppor¬ 
tunities, spite of his father’s name and his great connection, 
were of small import. He, as much as the humblest 
student of Gray’s Inn, has had to fight his way. He was 


ITS EXPIATION. 


511 


an adventurer. His family and name gave him advantages, 
intercourse with royalty, but the vast sum of his success 
has been the result of his labour and genius. His patience, 
his moderation, his undeviating habits of conciliation, his 
energy, have resulted in obtaining for him his title and 
his Chancellorship. His known insincerity hindered him. 
His want of principle ruined him. That is his story. In 
one aspect he is an example of successful enterprise. In 
the other of—just retribution. 

He has been no hero of romance, to rise and prosper by 
the mere caprice of an author, but has won his upward 
path, point by point, inch by inch, as many men do. If his 
means had only been just, he would have maintained the 
post he won. In his fall his life concerns us little more 
than the private life of any other statesman or philosopher. 
The moral is wrought out, the story told. Up to the 
zenith of his great ambition, the web of his career was 
woven in with the history of his times. He represents 
its unconstitutional tyranny, its fatal policy. He was the 
champion of absolutism. Possibly those who knew him in 
the days of his triumphs and success repined at the 
injustice of the just heavens which so rewarded a base 
friend, a traitorous subject, an unjust judge. Yet if they 
had had faith they would have seen retribution. Expiation 
does not follow often as surely. But, as all men know, 
the bolt frequently does fall on the criminal, or on his 
best beloved. 

Count “ no creature happy till he is dead,” says the 
proverb. And so with mean shifts for money, with base 
stories of his poverty, of his baseness, of his indebtedness 


512 


MAN AS THE ATOM. 


cleaving to him, and soiling his high fame, Bacon drops 
into the sere and yellow leaf. 

In passing over the series of years during which he 
lived, we have, as I think, traversed the most momentous 
period of English history. An era clearly identified with 
his powers and character. With his mission and place 
on earth. Man is no more isolated than he is alone. It 
may seem that the birth of a Galileo under the tyranny 
of the Inquisition; the career of a Shakspere as a mere 
player; indicates rather a fortuitous concurrence of cir¬ 
cumstances, than an exactly regulated combination of 
affairs. But there is an undoubted homogeneousness 
in the mass, and in the atom. When the necessity 
arises, the man appears. The only question is, as to the 
necessity. Human ideas and divine are not always con¬ 
current, and hypothetically it may serve to devote a 
chapter or two to Bacons relationship to history, to the 
progress of human affairs, even if merely to apply our 
consideration to the relationship of facts, and not with a 
view to elucidate his place and position, according to 
divine ordinance. 

In insisting on the dignified history of Elizabeth’s day, 
it is scarcely necessary to admit that its grandeur, mag¬ 
nificence, or poetry are alike capable of very large deduc¬ 
tions. All human splendour and magnificence has its 
prosaic side. The most subtle beauty of earth is subject 
to the hand of the anatomist. It is not, however, all 
history which admits of just poetic elevation. Fortunate 
is the nation that has an ideal or an elevated and poetic 
epoch to fall back upon—that has a great literature as 


THE SEVERITY OF JUSTICE. 


513 


its eternal standard of excellence—a vast philosophy still 
to be applied and worked out. 

Elizabeth’s age had its shadows. Its roads were bad, its 
people barbarous. Generally ignorant, superstitious, cruel. 
Corruption ruled in high places. The court, towards her 
death, became dissolute, and to some extent depraved. 
Justice was even more removed from the abodes of men. 
There was little discrimination in the axe or the gibbet. 
Death was the cure-all and end-all of punishment. The 
penitent and the impenitent, the accidental and the con¬ 
firmed criminal, met the same fate. Perlin, the French phy¬ 
sician, who published, the year of Elizabeth’s accession, an 
account at Paris of the English and Scotch people, plea¬ 
santly remarks, amid much bitter invective and undoubted 
enmity, that there were few great families which could not 
fortunately boast a headless relative. But if great fami¬ 
lies did not escape, they bore but a small proportion to 
the bulk of persons executed in various ways, and for 
different offences, large and small, of religion or of state. 
By imperfect trial, guilty or not guilty. But extremes 
frequently meet. Misery and grandeur are often near 
neighbours, and it is possible to make large deductions 
from all human happiness. But it must not be supposed, 
on this account, that the splendour of the last half of the 
sixteenth century was bounded between extremes. All 
good fortune is subject to fallibility. The bright light 
produces deep shadows. At every feast there sit 
ominous tokens of death and fate. Neither the court 
levee, nor the coronation of a King, nor the “ penny wed¬ 
ding,” are exempt from pangs of envy and of grief. 

The belief in the safety of a middle course, as applicable 

z 3 


514 


LIGHTS AND SHADES. 


to the phenomena of history or of the human mind, is one* 
of the most pitiable follies of the human understanding. 
It is the last shift of helpless and destitute mediocrity. 
Naturally, as the belief of the majority, it holds, amid the 
quicksands and shoals of time, as an anchor amid the 
fears and superstitions of men. It saves labour. It saves 
thought. But it is a false guide—false of all history. 
Especially false of Elizabeth’s. The lights were bright, the 
shadows deep. The total of happiness was, perhaps, the same 
then as now. But it fluctuated more violently between ex¬ 
tremes. Throughout Europe great changes had been going 
on. England was with more effort and pause, passing that 
epoch in history, which had been safely encountered more 
than a century before, on some portions of the Continent. 

An entire revolution of feeling had taken place 
throughout Europe. A night of darkness and desola¬ 
tion had followed upon the fall of the Roman empire. 
From amid the ruins of its literature, its learning, and 
its laws, a new and modern civilization, having distinctive 
moral attributes, slowly raised its head. The states of 
Italy had first answered to the awakening sound—to the 
trumpet of the morn. Art and the poetry of the ancients 
arose in Italy, side by side with many of the advantages 
and privileges of constitutional freedom. Throughout 
the Netherlands, commerce and wealth, and settled 
government, together with municipal power and local self- 
rule, had produced a vast measure of prosperity. The 
discovery of Columbus had opened out a new world for 
commercial enterprise and adventure. The invention of 
printing had developed more than a new sphere for the 
enterprise of thought. 


THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH COMMERCE. 515 


England had at last slowly responded to these advan¬ 
tages. Florence and Antwerp had become standards 
high and unapproachable, in art and literature, in com¬ 
mercial prosperity, wealth, and civic importance, before 
England awoke from the lethargy of ages, or freed herself 
sufficiently from the trammels of feudal law to enter on 
the career of modern civilization. She was at last arous¬ 
ing herself. 

The policy of the Tudors had been to depress the 
nobles, to strengthen the citizen. Trade had been opened 
with Denmark and Florence and all the wide-spread shores 
of the Mediterranean. Sebastian Cabot the younger had 
instigated a voyage of discovery for a north-west passage 
to China and the eastern world. Henry VIII. had esta¬ 
blished a royal fleet, and had founded the dockyards at 
Woolwich and Deptford, and the Corporation of the 
Trinity House. The monopoly of the Hanseatic League, 
or of the merchants of the Steel-yard as they were called, 
had been broken down.* The enterprise of various inde¬ 
pendent travellers, to Russia, Turkey, and the Indies, was 
leading to commercial relationships with these countries ; 
while the decline of the prosperity of the Netherlands, 
consequent on its long and bloody wars, and which was 
to culminate in the sack of Antwerp, was lending a vast 
stimulus to trade and enterprise in Britain. Lastly, there 
followed, as a seal and bond of union, the translation of 
the Bible, which was placed in every hand, giving to all 
men a common literature, a common religion, a common 
cause. 

If the commercial enterprise dawning during the Tudor 
* In 1552. 


516 


THE GREAT KING ELIZABETH. 


dynasty was awakening the human mind to a certain 
tolerance and liberality, a certain respect for literature, 
for the attributes and fashions of nations more gifted and 
cultivated than our own ; the introduction of a new 
religion, the establishment of a national church, the cham¬ 
pionship of a more tolerant faith, imposed on England, 
with vast responsibilities, an undeniably increased power. 
The imitation of the ancients, the revival of scholastic 
and classic learning, the fashion of travel, the emulation 
of Italy, had opened out the stores of Florentine as well 
as antique learning, and created a love of literature and 
of intellectual discipline, which are at the base of national 
enterprise, refinement, and prosperity. When a long- 
established internal peace, and a settled policy of govern¬ 
ment, had secured the possibilities of freedom, and some 
semblance of justice and of law, there came to the throne 
one of the most learned, if not the most learned, monarch 
in Christendom—the probably best scholar in her own 
dominions; a lady learned in French, Italian, Spanish, 
Greek, and Latin; a ruler at once wise and politic, 
resolute and conciliatory, haughty and affable, fitted to 
be King, with such citizens as Shakspere, Bacon, and 
Baleigh about her throne. One who was identified with 
the new and reformed faith, with intellectual freedom, in 
antagonism to the dominion of Rome, and the hateful 
tyranny of foreign ecclesiastics. One who was to intro¬ 
duce the fashion of being, not of seeming learned. Who 
was to be the high priestess of a new church, the head 
of the new birth of knowledge. 

Every one of Alexander’s followers, says Montaigne, 
carried their heads on one side as he did, the King setting 



THE DOMINION OF HOME. 


517 


the example. Elizabeth’s influence produced a similar 
effect. The ladies and courtiers of her court had their 
heads turned by learning as she had. The fashion was 
at least more beneficial than many that have reigned 
since. Intellectual refinement and the graces of scholar¬ 
ship, radiated from her court its influence on her people. 
Feudal influences had been wasting away; castles had 
been starved to feed cities. Mighty social changes had 
been wrought. The heavy hand of Rome had been re¬ 
moved from the sceptre and crown of England. Her 
tyranny had been sharp and terrible. Her policy had 
been fatally wise. It separated the weak from the strong 
portion of conservatism, that part which has been the un¬ 
doing of states from that which has led to power and 
prosperity. She had recruited her strength from the in¬ 
telligence of every class. While true to herself, her 
dominion was unassailable. Her ecclesiastics had sat in 
the councils, ruled in the law, absorbed alike the wealth 
and prosperity of the state, checked the parliament, and 
menaced the King. With this decline of Rome, this 
dawn of freedom and of commerce, of learning and enter¬ 
prise, what have Coke and Bacon to do ? Merely this. 

A new religion, a new world, a new literature, an 
awakened thought, liberty, and law, and justice, were 
awaking too. Many of the seeds of future greatness and 
prosperity were planted, requiring only time and patience 
for development. 

Henceforth all the resources of the island—her litera¬ 
ture, public policy, manners, customs, and laws—have to 
be estimated by the changes which are taking place. By 
these, Bacon’s mission and utility, his place and fitness, in 


518 THE DIVINITY THAT SHAPES OUR_ENDS. 

his age and nation, have to be estimated. A commercial 
state of citizenship is overthrowing the feudal. There is 
need to methodize the wisdom and lore of man. To give 
him practical command over nature. To methodize his 
thought. To arm the citizen and trader, the manufac¬ 
turer and shopkeeper. To place in his hand the wand of 
Prospero, giving him power over the spirits of air, and 
over the pent-up forces of nature. Man was being 
emancipated from the dominion of an all-powerful Church, 
and an equally rigorous social bond of military compact, 
which gave to the strong hand might and dominion. It 
was necessary that law should be strengthened, and freed 
from feudal injustice. That thought should be enfran¬ 
chised. That it should be made practical and subservient 
to man’s corporeal wants, to the necessities of increased 
population, removed from primitive habits, and Coke and 
Bacon arose. 

This, then, was in part the position of affairs when 
Elizabeth came to the throne. It is impossible to convey 
exactly, or even comprehensively, to the mind of any 
reader, in a book like the present, the precise state of the 
nation. But some little explanation is demanded to show 
Bacon’s necessity in the state—to show, with the oracle 
of Hippocrates, quoting Hooker, “ That each thing , both in 
small and great , fulfilleth the task which destiny hath set 
down , and concerning the manner they know not, yet is it 
in show and appearance as of executing and fulfilling the 
same.” This end is, in truth, part of his life. The uncon¬ 
scious purpose is not less than the conscious object. 
Shakspere’s task was to apply a divine philosophy, a 
divine theology, to the purposes and ways of life. To 


DIVINE DESTINY. 


51 $ 


show the beauty of that philosophy in its application to 
human affairs. To create an Art which should embody 
in action—Christian belief. Bacon’s purpose 1 do not, in 
part I cannot, as exactly indicate. It was undoubtedly to 
methodize the learning then being so rapidly attained. 
To bless the fertility with use. To assimilate, with 
fruition; economise thought; direct the labours of the 
mind ; and establish and systematize the human intellect, 
to a beneficent, wise, and useful end. 

It is impossible to convey vividly an exact estimate of 
the state of the nation, of the people, their habits, customs, 
dress, and literature. I wish merely to indicate some of 
its special features. For now arose, as out of night and 
chaos, the sun of England’s greatness. Now were deve¬ 
loped those mighty influences, absorbed from all the 
quarters of the world, which converge to form the greatness 
of empire. Now a new learning, science, philosophy, 
religion was begotten. The old bond of government, the 
feudal compact, was loosened. Then came the Virgin 
Queen to the throne, as the keystone of the arch to make 
and bind, to consolidate, under God’s providence, the laws, 
the religion, the peace and domestic policy, the literature 
and the intellectual glory of the nation. And then arose 
those majestic minds which were not merely to shed a 
lustre on their own times, but were destined to become 
exemplars to their nation, and to their race for ever. 


520 


THE GREAT TRIUMVIRATE. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

Bacon, Shakspere, and Coke were the master minds 
of the age in which they lived. They were the rulers 
and legislators of the revival of letters—of the birth of 
English literature and of English intellectual eminence. 

To point out precisely and fully their peculiar relation¬ 
ship to their age would require a separate treatise, which 
might in itself form a book. That this- classification is 
not altogether arbitrary or fanciful, that these three men 
were entitled to pre-eminent distinction, as benefactors of 
the human race, it would not be difficult to show. They 
fall under the class of “ founders of empires.” Empires 
in the universe of intellect. Monarchs, not of wastes and 
of barren deserts, hut of a 'wide-spread dominion, now 
governed by their laws, disciplined by their strong sense, 
and fortified by their impregnable discretion, having its 
citadel in the unapproachable eminence of their firmly- 
based supremacy. 

This is no image. It is a mere fact. As the tradi¬ 
tional leaders of the human race, out of a common 
material, budded cities and endowed them, converting the 
wilderness into a home, found clay and left marble, these 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOKALS. 


521 


sovereigns of the human race, built and endowed King¬ 
doms, bequeathing them laws of eternal force. Coke 
achieved so much for the liberty of man. Built up a city 
of refuge in the desert. Made it impregnable with justice 
and law. Enabled man to triumph successfully over ad¬ 
verse social organization, and against all those enmities 
which fraud or crime, or unbridled tyranny could bring 
against it. 

Bacon’s mission was to enable man to conquer the 
material world, to pluck out the heart of its mysteries, 
to make all learning tributary to man’s happiness. In 
the words of Pliny,* “ to apprehend all things under the 
cope of heaven,” or as Lord Bacon himself has more 
grandly and happily said, “ to take all learning for his 
province,” and so to wed himself to wisdom, that he 
might reject vain speculations and whatever is empty and 
void, so as to preserve whatever is solid and fruitful to 
the use and benefit of man—taking wisdom, not as a 
bondwoman for profit, or as a courtesan for pleasure, but 
“ as a wife, as a helper and friend.” 

In every relationship of man towards man, as husband, 
as citizen, ruler, master, as friend, servant, as father, as 
son, Shakspere’s philosophy is the best extant. His 
poetry may be described as the application of mediaeval 
wisdom to human affairs. Bacon’s to material issues. 
Coke’s to ministerial ends. For without freedom of 
speech and of expression, freedom of thought is useless 


* Book vii., chap. 25, Pliny, of Caesar “Animi vigore praestantissi- 
mum arbitror genitum Caesarem dictatorem. Nec virtutem constan- 
tiamque mine commemoro, nee] sublimitatem omnium capacem quae 
collo continentur,” &c. 


522 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF FACTS. 


and worthless; and philosophy, learning, and religious 
belief would be alike restricted, if the body were not 
free. 

That Bacon, in the ‘ Advancement of Learning,’ and in 
the ‘ Novum Organum,’ has enunciated principles, that are 
only imperfectly understood now, and still more inade¬ 
quately applied, is most manifest. He has exhausted all 
subsequent writers on the same themes. Very much has 
been written, more useful in its day and generation, more 
applicable to immediate necessities, more expanded in 
style, better adapted by detail and elucidation, to the times ; 
but some, indeed the chief of his maxims, are very in¬ 
sufficiently thought out now. A succession of passages, 
given under various heads, would fully illustrate this 
point; but is perhaps unnecessary here. 

The wisdom, which out of the learning of his time, 
said as part of a philosophical system for the better re¬ 
gulation of the mind, “That man must pursue things 
which are just in the present, and leave the future to 
the Divine Providence;” or again, that the vain search 
for a final cause, had so far (history being wisdom, teach¬ 
ing us by example,) failed, “ the pursuit of the limits of 
physical causes having bred a vastness and solitude in 
that trackor again, “ Let us seek the dignity of know¬ 
ledge in the archetype in the attributes of Gfod, so far as 
they are revealed to man , and may be observed with 
sobriety , not as learning or knowledge merely , but as 
sapience or wisdom ,” exhausted the mystery of nearly all 
the books since written, on human knowledge, on the 
culture of the mind, on the human understanding, on 
the intellectual powers, and on creative wisdom. 


INJUDICIOUS EDITORSHIP. 


523 


It may be objected that these maxims are like proverbs, 
more easily uttered than illustrated. Yet the art of 
creating these proverbs died with its inventor. All the 
voluminous treatises on ethics, metaphysics, theology, 
illustrated in many instances by vast lore, and most acute 
discrimination, lives of devotion and study, had not then 
appeared. But of the literature of his time, such oppor¬ 
tunities of travel as had been afforded to him, such 
knowledge of law, of public business, Bacon created a 
system (leaving it imperfect and fragmentary, it is true) 
of philosophy, and of educational discipline, still most 
imperfectly understood, still to be made valuable and 
useful to man. 

Edition after edition appears of his works, containing, 
as it would seem, matter for the scholar and the student, 
but perfectly terrible to contemplate in the present multi¬ 
plication of books—charges to juries, to judges, speeches 
on extinct treasons, and dismally defunct trials. Letters 
carted together, misdated, published without order, a 
mere chaotic mass, while two valuable, eternal, immutable 
treatises of wisdom, remain inedited, a “ sealed book ” 
to the majority of his countrymen. Five-sixths of his 
entire works were labours directed to the immediate 
necessities of the hour. If men could preserve everything 
that is written, were omniscient in absorption, such pro¬ 
ductions should be preserved, but at present no excuse 
exists for such indiscriminate, lax, and heedless editorship. 

Whatever Francis Bacon wrote has a certain value; 
but what he wrote believing himself immortal—with a 
view to eternal preservation, among the laws of men, is 
not wisely disposed amid the mass of his fugitive labours. 


t 


524 PRE- AND POST-CHRISTIAN WISDOM. 

Men, unless practised divers, will not seek in tEe sea for 
pearls though they know them to be there. Nor should 
we all be necessitated to seek the needle we require 
in its proverbial load of hay. Will no one wisely 
sacrifice himself, not to give a learned or profound in¬ 
terpretation of this author, but to his simple exposition ? 
—to present him in English, of the common people ? A 
small handbook would contain his best maxims, arranged 
in an orderly manner, in their proper systems, with their 
explanation, and application. But before proceeding to 
say more on this head, w r e will again turn our attention 
to consider the wisdom of which he was an exponent. 
What circumstances had conspired to give him authority. 
What place he occupied in the history of his time, in the 
history of learning, in the progress of the world. 

The sixteenth century is usually associated with the 
revival of letters, and of the arts, and with the dawn of 
modern civilization, as based on the combined results of 
classic and Gothic feelings in Europe. Then, for the 
first time, were combined pre-Christian with post-Christian 
resources. It is perhaps humiliating, but not less true, 
that Britain was nearly a century behind the Continent 
in literature, much more than a century in art, and that 
in this revival of an appreciation of the ancients, as well as 
in the development of an independent character and 
originality, in all intellectual and refined labour she was 
equally anticipated. 

Florence, and great part of Italy, had attained a 
zenith in intellectual eminence more than a hundred years 
before Bacon died. The greatest glories of Florentine 
literature were achieved in the days of the Planta- 



ROGER ASCHAM. 


525 


genets. All the great classics of antiquity were issued 
freely from the continental presses, while England was 
comparatively in darkness. For the first half of the six¬ 
teenth century the invention of Faust slumbered in Britain. 
The progress of the Reformation in destroying all the 
old monastic institutions, its public schools, and demolish¬ 
ing the libraries, had for the time checked the progress 
of education, and inaugurated an age of darkness and 
ignorance. From the date of Elizabeth’s accession a new 
grandeur and magnificence, a new intelligence and cul¬ 
ture, the empire of the England of to-day, arose. 

If remote causes, and not the nearest, were to be con¬ 
sidered, probably there is no man to whom England is 
more indebted for this resuscitation than Roger Ascham, 
the tutor of Queen Elizabeth and of Lady Jane Grey, 
and the author of the ‘ Schoolmaster ’ and c Toxophilus.’ 
As the tutor of the Queen, he was probably chiefly 
instrumental in imparting to her Majesty that love of 
letters and of educational accomplishment which she set in 
her own person, as a fashion. Undoubtedly, her country 
was much more heavily indebted to Elizabeth than his¬ 
torians have been prepared with candour to acknow¬ 
ledge. Possibly the fact of her being a woman, though it 
conduced to many fair speeches during her life, and much 
lip service, has sanctioned the insincerity. 

She was probably the most learned person in her domi¬ 
nions. What says Ascham himself, and tutors are sup¬ 
posed to be exacting?—“It is your shame. I speak 
to you all, young gentlemen of England, that one maid 
should go beyond you all in excellency of learning and 
knowledge of divers tongues. Point forth six of the 



526 


INTELLECTUAL DISCIPLINE. 


best given gentlemen of this court, and all they together 
show not so much good will, spend not so much time, 
bestow not so many hours daily, orderly and constantly, 
for the increase of learning and knowledge as doth the 
Queen’s Majesty herself. Yea, I believe that besides her 
perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, 
she readeth, now at Windsor, more Greek every day than 
some prebendaries of this church do read Latin in a week.” 
This is honest praise, for no more honest man than Roger 
Ascham ever lived. 

But his works abound with similar testimony, as they 
also do with proofs of his love and devotion to learning; 
not for show or gain, or from even an indiscriminating 
rapacity, but with a view to the advancement of his 
kind. With a sense of its mighty value in the civilization 
of man. With a spirit akin to Bacon’s own. In his own 
words, “ No one matter maketh more difference ’twixt man 
and man than learning. And though learning bring to 
every kind of man (who godlily doth use it) the truest 
pleasure, the surest profit, the greatest praise, that 
can be either gained on earth, or given from heaven 
(heaven itself only excepted), yet is not learning more 
fit and necessary to any other person than it is to a 
Prince.” 

Thus candidly he wrote to his Queen. Thus impressed 
on her that learning and wisdom are the only distinctions 
fit to be observed among men. And he proceeds to 
say, “ That as subjects ought by "reason and duty to obey 
and follow, princes are in dignity, and ought to be in 
worthiness, commanders and leaders, and therefore as 
masters and teachers. And shall he lead another, that 


THE DECAY OF LEARNING. 


527 


cannot go himself? or what shall he teach that nothing 
hath learned ? ” 

This is sufficiently candid, as directed to a monarch, 
but he proceeds even more plainly, though at too great 
length to be here quoted.* 

To pause for an instant and recall the servility of the 
dedications of Bacon, and of many of his successors, we 
may regret, that a literature that began so independently 
and nobly, should have suffered a decline rather than an 
elevation in dignity, since that day. It was little wonder 
that literature ceased to be respected when its professors 
ceased to respect themselves. 

As the tutor of Elizabeth, as a wise man, as a true 
lover of learning, as one most deeply impregnated with 
the social value of education, Ascham undoubtedly exerted 
a beneficial influence. His learned scholar, as the mis¬ 
tress of the state, as the head of the Protestant league, 
the champion of rotestantism, the ruler of a powerful 
nation, was, from the part she played in the drama, able 
to do much more. As has been already remarked, she 
made learning fashionable, and, in making it fashionable, 
secured its success. 

From Anthony Wood and Roger Ascham a moving 
picture of the decay of all learning and of the prevailing 
ignorance may be drawn when Elizabeth came to the 
throne. It was a dark night between two bright days. 
Mary’s reign being that brief interval which, in the poetic 
superstition of one of the most gifted and unhappy nations, 
is said to be the darkest, as the hour before day. Stimu- 

* Letter to Queen Elizabeth, with present of part of the Old Testa¬ 
ment. Printed in Dodsley’s Ed. 4to. 1761. 



528 


THE NATURE OF THE DECAY. 


lated by Henry’s munificence and scholarly feeling, a taste 
had arisen during his reign for literature, and several 
colleges were endowed at the universities. 

In some respects, Mary showed herself not unworthy 
her progenitor. But on^he testimony of Ascham, an 
undeniable authority on university matters, she was a 
bitter enemy in the main to the cause of learning. Ascham 
is not prejudiced. He has said that Mr. Medcalfe, the 
master of his college,* was a Papist, “but would to God, 
among all us Protestants, I might once see but one that 
would win like praise, in doing like good, for the ad¬ 
vancement of learning and virtueyet he says that 
from the accession of Mary “More perfect scholars 
were dispersed from thence, in one month than many 
years can rear up again. For when the boar of the 
wood (Popery) had passed the seas and fastened his foot 
again in England, not only the two fair groves of learning 
in England (the universities), were either cut up by the 
root or trodden down to the ground, and wholly went to 
wrack; but the young spring there, and everywhere else, 
was pitifully nipt, and overtrodden by many beasts, and also 
the fairest standers (trees) of all were rooted up, and cast 
into the fire, to the great weakening, even at this day, of 
Christ’s church in England, both for religion and learning,” 

He then proceeds to draw a doleful picture of the 
ignorance existing. That some of the greatest men of 
the university “ did labour to persuade that ignorance 
was better than knowledge that they had converted 
hedge priests into fellows, the benefits provided for 
learning being foully misused. 

* St. John’s Cambridge. 


THE IMITATION OF THE ANCIENTS. 529 

The rest of his testimony is in unison.* His letter to 
the Marquis of Northampton predicted, from the decay of 
grammar schools, the downfall of the universities. The 
clergy were ignorant. Their endowments had been con¬ 
fiscated. Their livings appropriated. Artificers and 
illiterate persons had from lack of worthier candidates 
been admitted to holy orders ; and spite of the fact that 
the first heads of the Reformation had been shining lights 
of intellectual cultivation, the seeds of the Reformation 
were threatened to be choked by the ruins on which they 
fell. If Luther, in the words of Bacon, “ being no wise 
aided, by the opinions of his own time, was enforced 
to awaken all antiquity, and to call former times to his 
succour, to make a party against the present time,” his 
followers were for a time hindered in following his 
example. Yet it cannot be doubted that Cecil and the 
heads of the reformed party were highly cultivated, and 
represented the cause of learning. Elizabeth herself was 
the most learned sovereign in Christendom. But it took 
nearly fifty years to develop that classical feeling which 
was subsequently to prove so great a bane to the progress 
of literature. A feeling which the earlier Elizabethan 
authors missed, but which grew and strengthened during 
her reign, till it entirely destroyed all native character, in 
native labours. 

This growth of classical learning tending more to 
fluency (copia) than weight, Bacon, with the dissonance be- 

* See also his note: “ Anno 1553, et Julii 6to. Nobillisim princeps, 
Edoardus sextus, immatura morte, ad hujus regni maximum detri- 
mentum, ad piorum omnium ingentem dolorem, ad omnium Anglorum 
immensum malum, et Rogeri Ascham, magnam calamitatem, diem 
obiit. M 


530 


ITS INCREASE. 


tween practice and precept that is common to mankind, 
deprecated severely in his ‘ Advancement of Learning;’ 
though his prose, perhaps unconsciously, occupies a tran¬ 
sitive position, between the purity of the “ English un¬ 
defiled ” of Sidney and Ascham, and the poetry of Milton, 
which is much more classic than English. And here it 
may be remarked, that it is singular that the same clas¬ 
sical feeling should pervade alike the monumental art, 
the architecture, and the poetry of James I. and Charles’s 
reign. Inigo Jones and Milton are equally indebted to 
antiquity. Bacon’s language is less classic in form, less 
stiffened through its tissue with classical imagery, less 
saturated with mythological allusions, but is still far re¬ 
moved from the simplicity of Ascham, or of Shakspere. 

That Bacon was unconsciously servile to the national 
feeling and fashion in the matter, there can be little 
question. On the testimony of Rawley, even if his 
writings did not afford unmistakeable evidence in proof, 
he ever sought sense rather than sound, and paid more 
attention to the matter and substance, than its form or 
mode of expression. Thus the ‘Essays,’ as revised in 
the edition of 1625, are as ponderous and pregnant as 
the text of Thucydides. So far his practice conformed 
to his precept—that while he introduced more classical 
allusion than befitted an English writer, his ’idioms are 
chiefly English from simple and familiar sources. 

His condemnation indeed was marked, though his prac¬ 
tice did not wholly concur. He has said: “ Here, there¬ 
fore, is the first distemper of learning, when men study 
words and not matter. Whereof, though I have repre¬ 
sented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will 


shakspere’s freedom. 


531 


be Secundum majus et minus in all time.” This last 
phrase with an allusion in the next sentence but one to 
Pygmalion’s frenzy, will precisely illustrate the point; the 
phrase “Secundum majus et minus” and the allusion, 
could have been as certainly much more forcibly ex¬ 
pressed in English. At the instant Bacon is decrying 
this species of ostentation he unconsciously falls into it. 
Whatever charge lay against the majority of the writers 
of Shakspere’s day, against the euphuistic authors, it is 
certain that its worst features were only attained in a 
succeeding age. 

The poetry of Milton, like much of that literature 
which succeeded it, is more foreign than English. Its 
idioms are classic; its allusions mythologic. It converts 
the story of the fall of man, and of his redemption from 
sin, into a classic epic on a heathen basis, and con¬ 
founds mythologic fable with knowledge drawn directly 
from inspired sources, from the study of nature, and 
the contemplation of the Deity. 

In art it is barbarous. As an example of this bar¬ 
barous art it is, however, transcendant. 

The poet of Stratford fortunately, though strictly 
contemporary, escaped even so much of this infection 
as Bacon was affected by. He was less influenced by 
the fashion of the time, being for all time. His unos¬ 
tentatious temper and profound discrimination saved him. 
He fell no victim to that classical feeling which the great 
philosopher so vehemently deprecates. His English was 
the English of the common people. So little obscured by 
affectation, so little impaired by conventional usage, as to 
be the most intelligible literature of his day. He has 

2 a 2 


532 


THE PHILOSOPHER’S NECESSITY. 


consequently suffered little by the lapse of time, and is 
almost as readable as he was then, while Bacon has be¬ 
come (in language only) to a great extent obsolete. 

To regulate the stores of learning opened out during 
the sixteenth century, to map out the land occupied by 
conquest, a master-mind in philosophy was needed. That 
mind had Bacon. Learning, that is, according to modern 
classification literature, science, logic, and natural phi¬ 
losophy centred in him. Poetry, criticism, logic, history 
had all taken their place in turn successively, before 
the Philosopher appeared who should be enabled to 
methodize their stores, and define the rules which were 
to guide the thought of succeeding generations. 


FOETRY THE FIRST TO ARISE. 


533 


CHAPTER XXV. 

Of the arts that sprung into new life at the revival of 
learning, poetry was, as usual, the first to respond to 
awakened civilization. This was in consonance with an¬ 
tique fable, and its mythologic impersonation in the person 
of Minerva. The season was in unison. The ages of 
chivalry had left vast stores of fabulous and partly historic 
stories, which had sunk into the popular mind and become 
traditions as sincerely recognized as truths of holy writ. 
The staple food was poetry ; the authors were poets ; all 
the books printed were poems. Among the books issued 
from Caxton’s press, were the 6 iEneid ’ of Virgil, trans¬ 
lated from the French and English versions of Selections 
from Cicero. Chaucer’s poems and translations of Boc¬ 
caccio, Petrarch, and Dante. These continued for the 
next fifty years to be the staple literature. In Burton’s 
day, the Tales of Boccaccio were the delight of winter 
evenings. Surrey’s Poems * were founded on the Italian 
model. 

It is from these sources—from the Hundred Tales 
of Giraldi and the novels of Bandello ; from Hollin- 


534 


THE INFLUENCE OF CATHOLICISM. 


shed’s History,* and from the translation of Plutarch, 
that Shakspere drew the chief materials for the plots of 
his plays. They were the familiar sources of knowledge 
of the bulk of the people. The chief classical poets 
were, before Bacon had settled in Gray’s Inn, translated 
into English—the seven first hooks of Virgil were “ done 
into English by Thomas Phaier,” and published before 
he was horn. While he was a baby in arms, the eighth 
and ninth hooks, dedicated to Sir Nicholas, were com¬ 
pleted by the same author. 

This will give some idea merely of the demand for poetry 
as compared with those made on the Histories, Satires, 
or Criticisms of the ancients—of the vast predominance 
of poetical over critical or analytical authorship, over 
history and biography. But the poetry of the time acted 
and reacted on the history of the time. Knight-errantry 
supplied it with stores of crude material; monkish legends 
with much more. The religion of the Catholic Church, 
with its magnificent ritual, its ceremonial pomp, its mys¬ 
terious legends, so calculated to awe and awaken the 
imagination, and its deep impressiveness of belief, aided 
in the cause. “ The Catholic religion,” says Warton, 
“ encouraged or rather authorized every species of cre¬ 
dulity ; its visions, miracles, and legends propagated a 
general propensity to the marvellous, and strengthened 
the belief of spectres, demons, witches, and incantations.” 
Thus insensibly the present fact lent a charm to the 
future fancy of the poet. 

Then there existed another element, in the strength 
and identity of human character. The angularity of the 


WITCHCRAFT AND SUPERSTITION. 


535 


human mind had not been worn away. Society had not 
smoothed the stone from the brook. Men preserved, un¬ 
tamed by conventional usages, many of the irregularities, 
much of the force and wildness of their natural tempers. 
The phases of jealousy, personal enmity, love, or malice 
were more strongly marked. They did what was right 
in their own eyes. There were no social barriers to 
curb infectious hate, or check the strong hand. “ Human 
statutes had not purged the general weal.” Assassinations 
and murder were encouraged by sanctuary. In the very 
heart of the City there lived a lawless host, the cankers 
of peace, the lees of bloody wars, swashbucklers and 
bravos, roysterers, beggars, and broken soldiers, soldiers 
of fortune, feudal retainers, dangerous to the peace of 
the Commonwealth. The evils of the plague, pestilence, 
and famine, battle, and murder, and sudden death, had 
then real significance. But facts were heightened and 
made more dreadful by ignorance. Every sudden death 
was said to be by poison. Every wasting away, by witch¬ 
craft. Jewel, one of the great lights of the Church, and 
the learned author of the ‘Apology,’ in a sermon deli¬ 
vered before the Queen urges publicly, “ These eyes 
have seen most evident and manifest marks of their [the 
sorcerers’] wickedness. Your Grace’s subjects pine away 
even unto the death ; their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, 
their speech is stemmed, their senses are bereft.” 

Thus Hatton, Raleigh, Burleigh, Leicester, Robert 
Cecil were all in turn charged with poisoning their ene¬ 
mies. The fear of Italian craft was popular. The crimes 
of the Borgias fructified by the heat of imagination in 
the general ignorance. Men read little, compared less, 


53(3 


GHOSTLY HORRORS. 


but believed all. Superstition and fear conspired to 
prevent anatomical investigation. Vesalius’ great book, 

‘ De corporis humani fabrica,” bad been published. But 
ignorance of the language in which it was written bad 
prevented the circulation of its knowledge in England. 
Thus about all men’s lives hung a mysterious fatality— a 
superstition begotten of fear and fancy, of credulity and 
ignorance. The terrors excited by the plague could not 
now be estimated. Some idea may be gleaned only in 
the later narrative of Defoe. But the uncertainty of 
information, the growth of rumour, helped to keep alive 
all the elements of fear, of superstition, of terror, and, in 
a word, all those elements of strong feeling, vivid impres¬ 
sion, and pregnant fancy which are the very thews and 
sinews of poetry. 

The material terrors of death were slight as com¬ 
pared with its ghostly horrors. The air was peopled with 
mysterious beings of another world. At night these 
creatures of phantasy were released. The spirits of mur¬ 
dered men, freed from their earthly cerements, walked 
abroad, to cry for justice against their murderers. The 
belief in God’s overruling justice is perhaps the strongest 
and most universal instinct of men’s nature. This was 
expressed in a belief, in its most direct manifesta¬ 
tion—in a form which demanded less faith and patience 
than any other—.-that murder would speak “ with most 
miraculous organ ”—that augury would often reveal the 
assassin, even if his own guilty fears and terrors were 
not so wrought on as to destroy his peace of mind. 

Metaphysics furnished no cause for immoral propen¬ 
sities, rash impulses, or the worst infirmities. Thus 



THE DEPTHS OF WISDOM. 


537 


good intentions were supposed to be frustrated by the 
spirits of darkness, by elves and goblins. Men attributed 
false causes to the material pains suffered by their bodies, 
in which they had their sensations to guide them. How 
much more were they likely to attribute material prompt¬ 
ings in the affairs of the mind, where they saw the result 
alone. Such and similar beliefs acted on poetry, and 
poetry again tinged these impressions. 

The beautiful and beneficent operations of Nature 
were associated with the loveliest forms—with fairies of 
surpassing beauty, who appeared clad in robes of celes¬ 
tial radiance, the emanations of loftier and brighter 
spheres. There was materialism in all this; but it 
was materialism of the most poetic and enchanting 
kind. The belief again held, that man, by knowledge 
and labour, attained mastery over these powers of the 
air, potent to raise, direct, and rule spirits. According 
to the texture of the mind in which these impressions 
took root was the coarseness or fineness of the result¬ 
ing picture. The beauty of the photograph depended 
on the accuracy of the lens, in the perfection of the 
chemical and artistic combination by which the results 
were realized. The popular Wizard or necromancer 
in some minds assumed the form of a malignant 
enemy to mankind, in others of a learned but mischiev¬ 
ous foe or a powerful knight, or a specious ally of the 
powers of darkness. In the plays of Shakspere, all 
these beliefs assumed the noblest, the most dignified form. 
The Witch of pernicious attributes and grovelling pur¬ 
suits rises to a tragic grandeur and magnificence. The 
Magician is merely a scholar who has dared the heights 

2 a 3 


538 


PROSPERO THE WIZARD. 


of human wisdom. In the person of Prospero in the 
c Tempest ’ he is preternaturally wise, beneficent, removed 
from human feeling and sympathy by the very height and 
abstraction of his pursuits. But with a Baconian lofti¬ 
ness of thought he has a Baconian iciness about his 
heart. Human griefs and joys barely affect him. He 
is scarcely susceptible of anger. With tenderness, but 
little love for his kind. Having mused too long on the 
perishable nature of all things, to feel a special concern 
for one. Thus the poetry of the time absorbed the beliefs 
of the time—condensed and embodied its acts; put its 
superstitions into verse; enshrined its fears and fancies 
in hexameters and alexandrines. And thus the chief of 
the poets played and toyed with all these fancies of the 
uninformed mind. Enshrined them in his verse, and left 
them to the wonder and delight, the reverence and wor¬ 
ship of succeeding generations. 

But these were but a few of the causes which gave to 
the Elizabethan age its distinguishing character, which 
governed and ruled the poetry of Shakspere, and which 
subserved the intellect of Francis Bacon. 

The discovery of the New World had given an entirely 
new direction to enterprise. This and the origin of a fleet 
in England of any importance, were almost concurrent cir¬ 
cumstances. The lands wrested from unknown space opened 
a field alike to the soldier, the maritime discoverer, the 
poet, the naturalist, the man of science, and the trader. 
Mercator and Copernicus had paved the way for utilizing 
the discovery. Chivalry and interest combined powerfully 
to stimulate the national ardour, and to open the New 
World for the benefit and the adventure of the Old. 


ZEAL AND ENTERPRISE. 


539 


Nearly all the great expeditions fitted out in Elizabeth’s 
day were for this destination. They were chiefly at 
private risk, and often at great loss to the noblemen and 
gentlemen who planned them. 

Essex, and Cumberland, and Howard had wasted their 
means in maritime ventures. A religious, a national and 
patriotic zeal combined to keep the light of enterprise 
alive. The knowledge of remote places on the world’s sur¬ 
face was strangely coupled with fiction, strangely impreg¬ 
nated with the phantasies of ignorance early in Elizabeth’s 
day. The list of popular errors, which Sir Thomas Browne 
catalogues as existing in his day, would give us only a 
faint notion of the popular notions of distant countries 
which prevailed a century before. Pliny was not an un¬ 
fruitful source; he had been in the hands of the school¬ 
men ; and filtered as he had been through the minds of 
monkish teachers, he had led to the propagation and 
diffusion of not a few errors. But there had been grafted 
on his stock a far more luxuriant growth of native origin. 
Men believed in seas of fire, in regions of thick-ribbed ice 
—in cannibals ; in anthropophagi; in demons of hideous 
aspect inhabiting remote worlds—in animals of ferocious 
nature and deadly mien—in tropical marvels that no eye 
had yet scanned. 

What was known of the terrors of Spain, and the 
mysterious and dreaded Inquisition; of the midnight 
murders enacted by its bloody tribunal; the tortures that 
had been brought on the unhappy Netherlanders, that 
had been seen by the travelled soldier with his own eyes, 
was calculated to arouse a dread and fear of this haughty 
nation. The Spanish occupation of America;—the mas- 


540 


THE EFFECT OF WARS. 


sacre of the Huguenots, when, as in a night, the angel of 
wrath and superstition bore down and sacrificed alike the 
innocent and the guilty, the virtuous and the depraved, 
the helpless and the strong, gave a force alike to living 
history and its concrete poetry. The deeds of the 
Borgias, the quarrels and feuds of the Florentines, the 
occupation of the Moors, the rise of the Venetian re¬ 
public, the resuscitated history of Greek and Roman, 
alike found their epitome in the chronicles of the times 
and in the dramas of the age. 

Before the end of the century classical knowledge was 
changing the aspect of thought and of national literature. 
It had not yet mastered and overthrown it. It added 
to the common stock of human errors. It advanced 
men’s appreciation of distant countries. It tempted their 
minds to adventurous exploits, to wars and strife, to splen¬ 
dour and display—to tell of the wonders of old Nile, of 
the marvels of Greece and Rome, of the civil policy 
of antiquity, and added, in conjunction with modern 
adventure, another source to the common stock of learn¬ 
ing and erudition which needed classification and direc¬ 
tion. 

War itself opened out several arts. Strategy and 
fortification, the results of gunpowder, were taking the 
place of the old system of warfare. It was true personal 
prowess still prevailed ; but gunpowder and art were fast 
superseding mere dexterity and personal valour. In 
some way, moreover, war, and the more vivid results of 
poetry and history, have been strangely united. In the 
period of greatest national glory, among the Athenians, 
the arts of oratory, the drama and history flourished 



CHIVALRY AND ROMANCE. 


541 


the brightest. Her dramatists, and poets, and historians 
were themselves soldiers. 

Thus was it in England. Sidney, Jonson, Surrey, 
Wyatt, Oxford, Sackville, Essex, Spenser, (and not im¬ 
possibly Shakspere himself,) had been soldiers. To these 
men the glory of swift death, in the imminent deadly 
breach, the terrors of storm, of sacking, of battle and 
murder, of death by famine, by the plague, by the fury 
of wild beasts, or by the wasting fires of pestilence, were 
familiar impressions. They sought in literature a con¬ 
genial food. The works first issued from Caxton’s press, 
the translations most greedily sought, were of books of 
bloody and wasting wars. The history of the Plague of 
Florence, The Wars against Troy, The lives of the heroes 
of Plutarch, The deeds of knights and heroes of Romance, 
of Arthur and the Round Table, The Search of the San 
Greal. A poetry which was to enshrine this lore, which 
was to be congenial to this generation needed to meet 
its taste. A philosophy which was destined to direct it, to 
supersede it, to suggest loftier aims and ends, could only 
arise, as its sun was going down, as its influences were 
weakening, and was only possible as new necessities 
arose. 

But it was not so much from literature merely, as in 
society generally, in the condition of the human mind, 
and of human reason, that the need for Bacon’s philosophy 
arose. 

From end to end the country became impregnated with 
religious feeling. Its superstitions took the form of 
heaven’s direct judgments for sin. The visitation of dis¬ 
ease, years of dearth, seasons of scarcity, all clearly 


542 


PURITANISM. 


determinable by known laws, which Bacon’s system has 
since given to the world, were associated with the direct 
manifestations of divine wrath—as if man did not per¬ 
petually invoke just and severe punishment. Thus we find 
before 1589, plays interdicted on account of the plague. 

Already pleasure and worldly pomp were becoming 
associated, in the confusion of the human mind, with the 
popish worship of images—all popish association with the 
direct intervention of the Almighty, although, the mate¬ 
rial prosperity of other nations, and the continued success 
of our own, under a different dispensation, gave the lie 
to the supposition. 

Some of the first measures of Cromwell, in Henry VIII.’s 
reign, had been directed against the material evidences 
of the Catholic faith, against images of saints and relics. 
Puritanism, as grave a superstition as popery, elevated 
these material evidences to supremacy in creed. It linked 
God’s wrath with the cut of a surplice, with a ceremony, 
or a graven image. It stumbled against these accidental 
and dissoluble presentments of an eternal creed; as if 
they were not transitory, but eternal too. It confounded 
the importance of a belief with the accidental character or 
representation of that belief. How far such a disposition 
was advantageous or necessary cannot be told. In effect, 
the zeal was, doubtless, useful and wise; but in sweeping 
away things, pernicious by association, it also overthrew 
many valuable institutions, and cast a stigma on much 
that was excellent, from which it has never yet become 
emancipated. From the injustice of such reasoning, such 
false deductions, such imperfect thought, a wiser philo¬ 
sophy was needed to extricate us. 



TOETRY. 


543 


There still remained other causes to which it is neces¬ 
sary to do little more than allude, which seem to form part 
in the chain of circumstance, which led up to the neces¬ 
sity of great master-minds, in the conclusion of Eliza¬ 
beth’s reign. And which contributed to shed that halo of 
glory about her career which makes it a phenomenon in 
history, inviting the speculation of the historian and the 
scholar, on the brilliant intellectual development of the 
age, and the premature mental supremacy it achieved. 

The chief of these that need to be enumerated were the 
indebtedness of English to Italian literature, the complete 
connexion which existed between the worlds of action and 
of belief; in other words, between the faith of the Reformed 
Church, and the positive support it required, in action and 
by example, and the enormous growth of poetry relatively 
to the diffusion of the exact sciences, which threatened 
to absorb all the literary resources of the time. 

On this last head, it may be noticed that all the first 
translations from the Italian were either of works of 
fiction or of poetry. Lord Macaulay, in his essay on 
Milton, makes some remarks founded on observation and 
analogy, with reference to poetry, with which it is almost 
impossible to disagree. That “ as civilization advances, 
poetry almost necessarily declines; that language, the 
machine of the poet, is best fitted for its purpose in its 
rudest statethat while the imitative arts require com¬ 
paratively little previous refinement or cultivation, the 
experimental sciences must necessarily progress but 
slowly. From the necessary care required in collecting 
materials for investigation, and the equally necessary cau¬ 
tion required in separating and combining its results; 


544 


SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT. 


and finally, that the tendencies, pursuits, and impressions 
of a comparatively rude state of society are advantageous 
and even necessary to the growth of poetry, while adverse 
to the cause of science. 

Without affirming my belief in all that Lord Macaulay 
has stated on the subject of the growth of poetry in 
civilized nations, I concur fully in this general deduc¬ 
tion as applied to this country. The rules he insists 
on, if not absolutely true, are specifically so with re¬ 
ference to England. The adventure and enterprise of 
the sixteenth century stimulated the taste for poetry; 
the chivalry of preceding ages had directed the tastes, 
feelings, and apprehensions of the heroes of the Armada 
and of Cadiz; but it would need something more than 
a merely general law to explain the presence of the 
two or three hundred publishing poets of Elizabeth’s day 
or the rise and culmination of the drama between 1580 
and 1610 ; while for at least five hundred years, language 
had been in that rude state, and society had possessed 
many of those elements conducive to poetry, in common 
with the sixteenth century. Printing, the translation of 
the Bible, the union of the cause of the Reformation with 
military and maritime supremacy may all, however, 
perhaps help us to account. 

But we hardly know whether to attribute the varied 
characteristics and lofty disinterestedness, of many of the 
Elizabethan men to the teaching of the new faith, to the 
influence of antique example, or to the training of circum¬ 
stance. That it formed a large element in the growth 
and culture of poetry there can be little doubt. Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert, the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, 





THE HEROES OF ROMANCE. 


545 


comforting his men with the assurance “ that heaven is as 
near by sea as by land Sidney, wounded, passing the 
glass of water to the soldier, with the confession, “Thy wants 
are greater than mine,” are elements in history peculiar in 
a certain grand simplicity to their own day. 

These were men who did not simply read or appreciate 
poetry, who were not merely sensible to poetic impres¬ 
sions, but men into whom poetry, had entered as part of 
their being, and who lived out its inspiration, as if the 
heroism and chivalry it inculcates, were a doctrine of 
duty and of morality. There was a concurrence of cir¬ 
cumstances to produce the result. If the general law will 
explain the circumstances, it will not explain the vivid 
manifestation, so that there is no alternative but to cata¬ 
logue some of the apparent causes. 

I have already alluded to the strange growth of poetry. 
The tradition derived from monkish legends and monastic 
times still held their ground; they wrestled with the in¬ 
coming faith. This was precisely the case with religion. 
Many of the fundamental portions of the Catholic creed 
still held their ground. Literature seemed to derive aid 
from both. The ghost in “Hamlet” propounds the doc¬ 
trine of purgatory.* The priests and monks of his drama 
are treated with the utmost reverence, so much so, that 
despite of many proofs to the contrary, he has been claimed 
as a member of that church. The reason being, as has 
already been shown, the fact, that although statutes might 
take away all the semblance of old creeds, it could not as 
effectually root out traditions, impressions, and beliefs im¬ 
planted and transmitted for many generations. This was 
* Wharton. 





546 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF BACON. 


one reason why Elizabeth, during her life, disapproved of 
the marriage of churchmen. 

Such a position was simply existent in poetry. The 
deeds of Arthur, of Guy Earl of Warwick, of Amadis of 
Gaul, of Siriac, of Sir Triamore, Sir Eglamore, and of 
Charlemagne, were the common property of chivalrous 
Europe. They held their ground against the heroes of 
sacred history. They helped to form the poetry of 
Spenser. Surrey, himself, the first poet of the sixteenth 
century, had passed through Europe like a hero of ro¬ 
mance, proclaiming the beauty of his mistress, and chal¬ 
lenging all true knights to mortal combat in her behalf. 
At Florence he held a tourney with the sanction of the 
Grand Duke of Tuscany, who gave free ingress and 
egress to all comers, and fortunately proved victorious. 
And in him we see the link that united the Raleighs, and 
Sidneys, and Cumberlands, and Howards, and Essex, 
with the knights of chivalry and romance. 

From being a partaker of a common feeling, or from 
rational conviction, or family influences, or from the phi¬ 
losophic calm of his mind, Bacon has steered a midde 
course in his philosophy, and such as would have been 
hardly possible half a century later. His writings are 
tinctured with the noblest reverence for divine authority, 
the loftiest appreciation of eternal wisdom, far above the 
petty schisms and squabbles of disputing controversialists, 
or angry disputants, whose creed is as narrow, as mean, 
as bitter as their minds. He says : “ Men have sought 
truth in their own little worlds, and not in the great and 
common world.’’ 

In the growth of learning, in the revival of letters, in 



HIS MORAL DEFORMITY. 


547 


the adventure and heroism of his age, in the latitude 
imparted by its religious tolerance, in the relative freedom 
from restraint, and in the birth of a scientific life, based 
on the decline of a poetic and chivalrous history, Lord 
Bacon’s life and philosophy takes its place. He, as much 
as Shakspere, was of Pallas’s brood. He leapt, ready-armed, 
into the arena of life, a god in apprehension and wisdom, 
to give laws to mortals, and to forestall the knowledge of 
many centuries. As he was the first of English theoretical 
philosophers, so is he the greatest. That his private life 
did not answer in moral dignity to his philosophy and his 
great aims, is certainly perplexing. But I have no sym¬ 
pathy with those morbid and pining sentimentalists who 
deplore it. We are bound to accept heaven’s decrees in 
humbleness. 

That there can be no possibility of mistake on this 
point — that with many claims to our admiration and 
love, he was a pitiful citizen, must, on the most indu¬ 
bitable testimony, be admitted. Even supposing some 
fractional part of his letters may be explained away, 
some of his acts justified, there will still be enough left 
to damn him. Why should the truth be hidden ? Why 
should men fear to look at the light ? It is not the duty 
of the historian or the biographer to hide or obscure one 
detail of intrinsic importance. He is simply bound to 
record the truth, because, when he has taken up his 
.theme, a mightier hand may sweep the chords and draw 
a nobler moral than merely pitiful and conventional trim¬ 
ness will offer. If the oak has not the symmetry of the 
yew, the system of gardening, which would effect a 
similar uniformity, might please a weak generation, but 



548 


THE IMPOSTURE OF LITERATURE. 


is hardly a benefaction to the species. So in declaring 
that Lord Bacon was not a patriot, nor an honest judge, 
nor a good friend, nor a fond husband, I am moved by no 
feeling. It seems to me, to neither influence the cause 
of philosophy nor the reverse. There is a pitiful race, it 
is true, who rail at great gifts as often attended with fatal 
infirmities. On the one hand, their philosophy is right, 
for it behoves the wisest to take heed less he fall. On 
the other, great gifts involve great temptations. But as a 
rule, the wisest are the best of men. This is their an¬ 
swer. Lord Bacon was the extreme exception, who 
proved the rule otherwise all but universal. 

In conclusion, I have fulfilled my task little to my own 
satisfaction No critic can come to it with greater severity 
of feeling than I do. The subject is magnificent and all 
but illimitable. But if I have served only to dissipate 
some few of those errors which the merest quackery and 
imposture of modern literature, has attempted to throw 
about the name of Bacon, I shall rest content. 

Francis Bacon was the practical genius of the Anglo- 
Saxon race, dealing with the mightiest problems of the 
human mind in reference to material things. His was the 
first reach of free thought, of unbounded inquiry, guided 
by the loftiest discrimination into the, at that time, hidden 
sources and unexplored regions of exact inquiry. The 
standard he planted in those unknown lands has never 
been approached. We look across the waste of writers 
since his time; but he alone seems, no barren but an 
evergreen Hymettus, soaring above his fellows. 

He sprung up amid all this miscellaneous power, this 
varied knowledge, this union of antique and modern lore, 


“wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.” 549 

of poetry with philosophy, of paganism with Christianity, 
before knowledge had unsettled the minds of men, to 
utilize and apply those stores of wisdom which were 
falling to our hands. In the very wealth and affluence of 
learning in his day, there was danger. In the fertility 
and luxuriance of its imagination, in its unbridled copious¬ 
ness of production, there was necessity for order and 
direction. Some one was needed to turn and wind the 
fiery Pegasus, to train and culture the wild exuberance 
of intellectual activity. Men, as he has said, “ disdained 
to spell, and so, by degrees, to read in the volume of 
God’s works,” and “ deluded themselves by invoking their 
own spirits as oracles, instead of reverently and humbly 
pursuing nature,” all of which he came to reform. 

That men listened and immediately practised the con¬ 
trary, “ as if it had been a common sermon,” is not the 
fault of his argument. If that last axiom of his alone had 
been acted on, how much waste learning might have been 
saved, how much false acting and evil prevented! The 
peculiar genius of the nineteenth century is in various 
ways only now attempting to enforce it. In fine, there¬ 
fore, recognizing his mission, his transcendant wisdom, 
his impaired life, as here imperfectly but accurately 
delineated, I am constrained to defer again to the 
poetical assertion, not as being the exact truth, but as 
being approximately so, that he was the “ wisest, bright¬ 
est, meanest of mankind.” 













APPENDIX. 


(Vide Trial of Norfolk, page 27.) 

A warrant was issued for tlie racking of two of the wit¬ 
nesses in the trial of Norfolk—Barker and Bannister; but 
in the course of the trial it was denied that it had been 
acted on, at least against Bannister. Here it is :— 

“ Elizabeth R. By the Queen. 

“ Right trusty* and well-beloved we greet you well; and 
finding in the traitorous attempts lately discovered, that 
neither Barker nor Bannister, the Duke of Norfolk’s men, 
have uttered their knowledge, neither will discover the 
same without torture; forasmuch as the knowledge hereof 
concerneth our surety and estate, and that they have un¬ 
truly already answered; We will and by warrant hereof 
authorize you to proceed to the further examination of 
them upon all points, that you can think by your dis¬ 
cretions meet for knowledge of the truth. And if they 
shall not seem to you to confess plainly their knowledge, 
then we warrant you to cause them both, or either of them, 
to be brought to the rack, and first to move them with 
fear thereof to deal plainly in their answers; and if that 
shall not move them, then you shall cause them to be put 
to the rack, and to find the taste thereof until they shall 
deal more plainly, or until you shall think meet. And so 
we remit the whole proceeding to your further discretion, 

* The spelling has been modernized. 



552 


APPENDIX. 


requiring you to use speed herein, and to require the 
assistance of our Lieutenant of the Tower. 

“ Given under our signet the 15th of September, 1511. 

“ To our trusty and right well-belov Councillor 
Sir Thomas Smith, Kt., and to our trusty and 
well-beloved Doctor Wilson, one of the Masters 
of our Requests. 


SIR WALTER RALEIGH TO SIR ROBERT CECIL ON THE EXECUTION 
OF ESSEX. 

(From Murdin, vol. ii. p. 811.) 

“ Sir— 

“ I am not wise enough to give you advice, but if 
you take it for a good counsel to relent towards this Tyrant, 
you will repent it, when it shall he too late. His malice 
is fixed, and will not evaporate by any of your mild 
courses, for he will ascribe the alteration to her Majesty’s 
pusillanimity, and not to your good nature, knowing that 
you work but upon her humour, and not out of any love 
towards him. The less you make him, the less he shall be 
able to harm you and yours. And if her Majestie’s favour 
fail him, he will again decline to a common person. For 
after revenges fear them not. For your own father that was 
esteemed to be the contriver of Norfolk’s ruin, yet his son* 
followeth your father’s son, and loveth him. Humours of 
men succeed not, but grow by occasions, and accidents of 
time and power. Somerset made no revenge on the Duke 
of Northumberland’s heirs. Northumberland that now is, 
thinks not of Hatton’s issue. Kelloway lives, that mur¬ 
dered the brother of Horsey, and Horsey let him go by all 
his life-time. I could name you a thousand of those, and 
therefore after fears are but prophecies, or rather conjec- 

* Probably Lord Thomas Howard, who is in close alliance with 
Robert Cecil, and of his faction. One of Essex’s judges. 



APPENDIX. 


553 


tures, from causes remote. Look to the present, and you 
do wisely. His son shall he the youngest Earl of England 
hut one; and if his father he now kept down, Will Cecil* 
shall he able to keep as many men at his heels as he, and 
more too. He may \o match in a better house than his; 
and so that fear is not worth the fearing. But if the father 
continue he will he able to break the branches, and pull 
up the tree, root and all. Lose not your advantage. If 
you do, I read your destiny. Let the Queen hold Both- 
wellf while she have him. He will ever he the canker of 
her estate and safety. Princes are lost by security and 
preserved by prevention. I have seen the last of her good 
days, and all ours after his liberty.” 

Every word of this letter might be weighed with advan¬ 
tage to those curious in the character of Baleigh. It is a 
picture in little of his mind. Its force and energy; its un¬ 
scrupulous directness of purpose; its argument, are all 
most characteristic. It does not mince matters. Baleigh 
knows his man. He uses no argument but one addressed to 
soothe Kobert Cecil’s fears. “ Kelloway lives, that mur¬ 
dered the brother of Horsey,” is certainly a potent and 
most plain-spoken justification. There is no suggestion 
that Essex’s crime is worthy of punishment. No pretence 
made of law or justice. Robert Devereux is dangerous to 
us. “ All our good days ” are gone if he is released. He 
cannot revenge himself. His son is too young. Your son 
shall match him in following. These are the arguments. 
Besides, murdered men are never avenged. As a com¬ 
mentary on this sanguinary counsel, I will quote Sir 
Henry Wotton’s of Essex conduct to Baleigh. 

“We have many (examples) of his lenity, and one of 
his facility. When he did connive at the bold trespasse of 
Sir Walter Baleigh, who, before his own arrival at Fayal, 
had landed there against his precise commandment, at 

* William Cecil, eldest son of Robert Cecil, and bis heir, 

t Both well, Raleigh’s nickname for Essex. 


554 


APPENDIX. 


which time he let fall a noble word being pressed by one 
(whose name I need not remember), that at the least he 
would put him upon a martial court. That I would do 
(said he), if he were not my friend.”—Wotton, Parallel, 
p. 12. Ed. 1641. 


EXTRACTS FROM THE PARALLEL DRAWN BY SIR HENRY WOTTON 

BETWEEN ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX, AND GEORGE 

VILLIERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. 

The Earl of Essex had accommodated Master Anthony 
Bacon in a partition of his house, and had assigned him 
a noble entertainment: this was a gentleman of impotent 
feet, but of a nimble head, and through his hand runne all 
the intelligences with Scotland ; who being of a provident 
Nature (contrary to his brother the Lord Viscount St. 
Albans), and well knowing the advantage of a dangerous 
secret, would many times cunningly let fall some words, 
as if he could amend his fortune under the Cecilians (to 
whom he was near of alliance and of blood also), and who 
had made, as he was not unwilling should be believed, 
some great proffers to win him away; which once or twice 
he pressed so far, and with such tokens and signs of appa¬ 
rent discontent, to my Lord Henry Howard, afterwards 
Earl of Northampton (who was of the party, and stood him¬ 
self in much umbrage with the Queen), that he fiys pre¬ 
sently to my Lord of Essex, with whom he was commonly 
jirima admissionis , by his bedside in the morning, and tells 
him that unless that gentleman were presently satisfied 
with some round sume all would be routed. 

This took the Earl at that time ill provided, as indeed 
oftentimes his coffers were low, whereupon he was fain 
suddenly to give him Essex House; which the good old 
Lady of Walsingham did afterwards disengage out of her 
own store, with two thousand five hundred pounds, and 
before he had distilled fifteen hundred pounds, at another 



APPENDIX. 


555 


time, by the same skill; so as we rate this one secret, as 
it was finely carried at four thousand pounds in present 
money, besides at the least one thousand pounds of annual 
pension to a private and bed-rid gentleman, what would 
he have gotten if he could have gone about his own 
business ? 


Extracts, presumed to be in Bacon’s hand, from his 
pamphlet on Raleigh’s death, entitled ‘ Declaration of 
the Demeanour and Carriage of Sir Walter Raleigh, and 
of the true motives and inducements which occasioned 
his Majesty to proceed in doing justice upon him, as 
hath been done; so far as Bacon’s hand seems manifest.’ 
London: printed by Bonham Norton. 1618. 

PREFACE. 

Although Kings be not bound to give account of their 
actions to any but God alone; yet such. are his Majestie’s 
proceedings, as he hath always been willing to bring them 
before sun and moon, and careful to satisfy all his good 
people, with his intentions and courses, giving as well to 
future times as to the present, true and undisguised de¬ 
clarations of them; as judging, that for Actions not well 
founded, it is advantage to let them pass in uncertain 
reports; but for Actions that are built upon sure and solid 
grounds (such as his Majestie’s are), it belongeth to them, 
to be published by open manifests: Especially his Ma¬ 
jesty is willing, to declare and manifest to the world, his 
proceedings in a case of such a nature as this which fol- 
loweth is; since it not only concerns his own people, but 
also a foreign prince and state abroad. 

Accordingly therefore, for that which concerneth Sir 
Walter Raleigh, late executed for treason (leaving the 
thoughts of his heart and the protestations that he made 
at his death to God, that is the searcher of all hearts and 
judge of all truth), his Majesty hath thought fit to manifest 



556 


APPENDIX. 


unto the world, how things appeared unto himself, and 
upon what proofs and evident Matter and the Exami¬ 
nation of the Commanders that were employed with him 
in the Voj^age (and namely of those which Sir Walter 
Raleigh himself by his own letter to Secretary Winwood, 
had commended for persons of special worth and credit, 
and as most fit for greater employments), his Majesty’s 
proceedings have been guided; whereby it will evidently 
appear how agreeable they have been in all points to 
honour and justice.” 

If this is not clearly Bacon’s the next paragraphs are : 

“Sir Walter Raleigh having been condemned of High 
Treason, at his Majesty’s entrance into this kingdom, 
and by the space of fourteen years, by his Majesty’s 
princely Clemency and Mercy, not only spared from his 
Execution, but permitted to live, as in Libera Custodia 
in the Tower, and to enjoy his Lands and Living, till all 
was by law evicted from him upon another ground, and 
not by forfeiture; (which notwithstanding his Majesty 
out of his abundant Grace gave him a competent satisfac¬ 
tion for the same) at length, he fell upon an enterprise of 
a golden mine in Guinea. 

“ This proposition of his, was presented and recom¬ 
mended to his Majesty by Sir Ralph Winwood, then Secre¬ 
tary of State, as a matter not in the air , or speculative , hut real 
and of certainty .” 

CONCLUSION, PAGE 60. 

“For these his great and heinous offences, in acts of 
hostility upon his Majestie’s confederates, depredations, 
and abuses, as well of his commission as of his Majestie’s 
subjects under his charge, Impostures, Attempts of escape, 
declining his Majestie’s justice, and the rest, evidently 
proved or confessed by himself; he had made himself 
utterly unworthy of his Majesty’s further mercy: And 
because he could not by Law be judicially called in ques¬ 
tion, for that his former attainder of Treason is the highest 




APPENDIX. 


557 


and last work of the Law (whereby he was civUiter mortuus ) 
his Majesty was enforced (except Attainders should become 
privileges for all subsequent offences) to resolve to have 
him executed upon his former Attainder. 

“ His Majesty’s just and honourable proceedings being 
thus made manifest to all his good subjects by this pre¬ 
ceding Declaration, not founded upon conjectures or like¬ 
lihoods, but either upon confession of the party himself, 
or upon the examination of divers unsuspected witnesses, 
he leaves it to the world to judge, how he could either 
have satisfied his own justice,” &c., &c. 


NOTE ON TORTURE. 

Several considerations are urged on our notice, in esti¬ 
mating Bacon’s culpability, in the employment of Torture. 
As the justification, by custom, by precedent, in the man¬ 
ners of the age, or in the nature of the crime. But first it 
must be distinctly understood, that the mere cruelty of 
Torture, is not in point at all—in no respect imparts to 
the act its flagrance or criminality. For the punishments 
of hanging and bowelling, of burning, of severe flogging, 
of continued incarceration in noisome and pestilent prisons, 
of “ the silent system,” may have been, each or all, more 
severe and cruel in their effects, than the application of the 
manacles or the rack, unless their harshest penalties were 
taxed ; while, as with the punishment of flogging in our 
own days, the ordinary use of these instruments fell much 
short of the extraordinary and possible abuse. 

Abstractedly the iniquity of Torture lies simply in its 
use to extort evidence. That it is an instrument to be 
avowedly employed on possibly innocent men—on citizens 
as yet unconvicted of crime, and whom the law therefore 
presumes to be innocent. That preceding trial in every 
case for the particular offence which was to be proved only 

2 B 2 



558 


APPENDIX. 


by its use, it was in breach of the common law of England, 
and in direct violation of the 29th cap. of Magna Charta. 
For so tender is the English law as expounded by its 
greatest commentator of the liberty of man, that not merely 
must every man be first tried by fair trial, and by his 
peers, before he is to be degraded by punishment, but it is 
illegal to put even the worst or most notorious malefactor 
by repute, in bonds or fetters, though he be prisoner. 
Lord Coke sa} r s —“ By the common law the jailer could 
not lay irons on his prisoner, for his safe keeping, as 
appears by all our ancient authors.” And again :f—“ It is 
a maxim in law, ‘ Non alio modo puniatur , quis quam secundum , 
quod se habeat condemnation ” A concession to principles of 
abstract right, which proves that the most enlightened 
reverence for the purest justice ruled in the bosom of the 
Lord Chief Justice of England, whatever may have been 
the severity of his practice, or how much soever it fell 
short of his precept. 

This, then, the illegality of Torture, not its mere cruelty, 
is the stamp of its iniquity, and of the criminality of those 
who employed it. Till a very recent period in English 
history, the punishment peine forte et dure —at least as cruel 
as Torture—might have been inflicted on all persons who 
obstinately refused to plead. Its legality was not im¬ 
paired till it was repealed in the reign of George IV. J 
Blackstone has given an explanation of its terrors. The 
prisoner was remanded to the prison from whence he 
came, “ and put into a low, dark chamber, and there laid on 
his back on the bare floor naked, unless where decency for¬ 
bade ; that there should be placed upon his body as great a 
weight of iron as he could bear, and more ; that he should 
have no sustenance, save only on the first day three morsels 
of bread, and on the second day three draughts of water 
that should be nearest to the prison door, and so till he 

* 2 Inst. 35. t 3 Inst. 52. 

f 7 & 8 Geo. IV., c. 28, s. 1. 





APPENDIX. 


559 


died, or as antiently tlie judgment ran, till he answered.”* 
This seems at least as cruel and barbarous as the rack, but 
it differed from it, by the essential particular, that this was 
a punishment for obstinacy, and for contempt of court. In 
treason, and all misdemeanours, the standing mute was 
held to be equivalent to conviction. In felony, after 
repeated admonition, the prisoner was thus punished. 

Thus we may perceive that Torture was repugnant to 
humanity, as being opposed to liberty and to right, using 
the word in its legal sense. It was an instrument in the 
hand of Tyranny against innocence. On this account 
Coke, with deference to that abstract equity wdiich is the 
ultimate end and loftiest consideration of law, had declared 
emphatically against it, and had emphasized the law itself 
For it was clear that if the law was so tender of innocence, 
that it would not permit fetters even for safe keeping, it 
assuredly would not permit such severe punishments as the 
rack. 

But in opposition to the law it would seem that the 
King maintained among his prerogatives, the right to 
inflict Torture ; to issue a warrant, enforcing its use ; and 
that under and by this prerogative the infliction of Torture 
in its several forms, had degenerated into a custom in the 
times of the Tudors. 

In this custom, and not in any law, then, must we find 
Bacon’s justification, if it exists at all; and for the purpose 
of sifting it, we may fairly divide it into the Use and Abuse 
of Torture. 

First, the use. Judged by Coke’s law, it is obvious no 
use could arise. It was utterly and fundamentally an 
abomination. But it is also manifest, that it was fre¬ 
quently employed, and that at a period when, at the mere 
will of the Monarch, or at the instance of an ordinary, a 
citizen could be brought to the stake and burned, without 
any legal trial; too nice a spirit of justice or humanity, in 

* Blackstonc, vol. iv„ pp. 458, 459. 


560 


APPENDIX. 


practice, must not be insisted on. Its employment in cases 
where evidence was withheld, or believed to have been 
withheld, for the discovery of accomplices in heinous 
crimes, as justified by precedent, must therefore be held as 
its use. Its employment for base, or purely tyrannical, or 
selfish ends, on innocent persons, must be held as its abuse. 

Torture during the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and 
Elizabeth, had undoubtedly degenerated into a custom. 
On this point Mr. Hargraves —wise and learned authority 
that he was—was clearly wrong, and Mr. Jar dine as in¬ 
dubitably right. The statistical evidence of the number of 
warrants issued settles the point. Nearly fifty persons were 
racked in as many years,—probably a few more, possibly a 
few less. This use would go far to exonerate any indi¬ 
vidual of specific or particular cruelty, or at any rate of so 
much exceptional cruelty as to excite wonder or execration. 
For although more than as many murders were undoubtedly 
committed during the same time, and yet each murderer 
held obnoxious to public justice, the warrants of Torture 
during this period, bore on their face the names of many 
eminent judges, lawyers, and statesmen. On this account 
mere use would not be very odious, though undeniably 
culpable. While it is also obvious, that if that individual 
possessed unusual or extraordinary powers of reason, or 
discrimination, a larger sense of justice might fairly be 
expected of him, a greater refinement, a more complete 
abhorrence of cruelty, and that to some extent education 
and reason must be taken as proof in the same ratio of 
innate depravity of heart. 

At this point would arise, then, the question of abuse — 
in other words, its exceptional use. First, on innocent 
men—innocent of the particular crimes with which they 
were charged. Secondly, on persons of limited crimi¬ 
nality, as opposed to its use on old, hardened, and invete¬ 
rate malefactors; and thirdly, its excessive and cruel appli¬ 
cation. 



APPENDIX. 


561 


And on either of these grounds, with every argument of 
usage and precedent in its favour, its adoption would of 
course imply criminality. And on all of these grounds, its 
use might still be aggravated, by the motive or intent of 
the person employing it. 

As thus: it might be ordered in passion, in ignorance of 
its severity, or with both combined; or with a belief, 
erroneous, certainly, but honest, of its efficacy in the cause 
of truth; or with a view to its really furthering justice. 
In times of war, or of public danger, a disinterested pur¬ 
pose might qualify the enormity; while, on the contrary, 
its employment for base, nefarious, or purely selfish ends, 
would considerably aggravate the detestation with which 
we must regard its adoption. 

Unhappily, judged by every one of these considerations, 
Lord Bacon’s racking of Peacham falls into the very lowest 
category, but one—combines in itself every element of 
aggravation here indicated, and in itself, is so conspicuously 
monstrous in its features as to be capable of no exaggera¬ 
tion. It was on an innocent man. It was not on a 
notorious criminal. It was in no period of public com¬ 
motion. It was for no public end. It was not for justice’ 
sake. It was from a purely selfish and interested motive. 
Not blindly, or in passion, or with ignorance, but de¬ 
liberately, with pause, and effect, by one of the most acute 
reasoners and most highly-educated men of his day; and 
here we may again turn to the facts. 

By reference to Mr. Jardine’s exhaustive reading on the 
subject, we find that in a space of nearly a hundred years, 
extending from 1551 to 1650, more than fifty warrants 
of Torture were issued, and on these something like fifty- 
five persons were subjected to the ordeal, before the acces¬ 
sion of J ames. 

That these victims were for various offences: for murder, 
for the detection of accomplices in robbery, for misdemea¬ 
nours of notorious felons ; and, chiefly about the year 1580, 


562 


APPENDIX. 


in the cause of religion for saying of mass, &c., and for the 
treasonable practices which at that time Catholic tenden¬ 
cies were presumed naturally to imply. That between the 
accession of James, and the year 1620, three cases only of 
Torture appear,* and in two of these Bacon was the prime 
adviser and actor in chief; and that from that date to the 
present time, amid all the cruelties of the civil war, only 
three other cases are known to have taken place in England, 
although in the various continental nations of Europe, the 
custom was upheld till a much more recent date, j 

During the whole of Elizabeth and James’s reign it can¬ 
not be doubted that public feeling was directly opposed to 
its use. That the opinion of all lawyers was against it, 
and so far as can be ascertained, the use, though not with¬ 
out precedent, was even then looked on as an abuse ; as an 
unlawful and arbitrary usurpation of power ; or, like many 
other indignities then practised on prisoners, to which 
publicity was not given, as an infraction attempted in the 
imperfect state of the law, and because the law was in¬ 
sufficient to protect the prisoner. As violent and as really 
illegal and improper, as the cruelty of a turnkey, or a 
governor, or the occasional barbarity of a warder or keeper 
would be considered to-day. 

And as this may be doubted and disputed, it will be as 
well to advert to the general argument which is and has 
been often adduced, with great ignorance: that the age 
was cruel and barbarous, bloody and vindictive, and must 
not be judged by the usages and humanity of to-day—an 
ad captandum solution founded on cursory and inexact ac¬ 
quaintanceship, and in some respects singularly erroneous. 

The sports of Elizabeth’s day were barbarous. As bar- 

* In addition to that of Fawkes, not by warrant, but by written 
.direction of the King. 

t Torture was not abolished in France till October 9, 1789 ; Russia 
1801, Bavaria and Wurtemberg 1806, Hanover 1822, Baden 1831.—Jar- 
dine, p. 31. I have, moreover, read in a newspaper, some years ago, 
that it was used as lately as 1799 in Ireland. 




APPENDIX. 


563 


barons on the score of mere inhumanity andundefiled cruelty, 
as many phases of field sports are to-day. The criminal 
punishments were severe. The populace was ignorant and 
cruel. And yet so much more do men err from want of 
thought, than from want of heart, from carelessness than 
from intentional cruelty, that it would not be difficult to 
show, that the educated classes were not less humane than 
they are in the reign of Victoria. In a passage already 
adverted to in Ascham’s ‘ Schoolmaster,’ we find men dis¬ 
puting on scholastic discipline, with many similar argu¬ 
ments of humanity or of expediency, to those they would 
hold to-day ; while the acts of individuals were refined by 
as lofty a charity in the cases of Essex, Sidney, and South¬ 
ampton, as they would be now. The attempt to stig¬ 
matize the age generally as cruel, or determine the special 
accusation by a merely vague and general statement, is in 
the highest degree improper. The sports of the populace 
were some of them cruel and debasing, because cruelty was 
not interdicted. The absence of interdiction may have as 
much arisen from want of strength in the Executive, as 
want of will. Moreover, a certain time, and even a com¬ 
mensurate license, is required to prove any evil, and to 
legislate against it. Without penal enactments the sports 
of that day would be as popular and as freely recognized 
among the same classes in this, as in the 16th, century. 
Legislation was less explicit, as well as being less compre¬ 
hensive, than it is at present. For this reason, though it 
may be admitted that the age was cruel and intolerant, 
because the relative mass of the uneducated population w^as 
larger, yet it must be insisted that amoug the cultivated 
classes as great a humanity, and as thorough a dislike to 
cruelty existed then as now. 

As proof of this, we have the instance, among others, 
that Sir Thomas Smith, in Elizabeth’s day, desired to be 
exonerated from the misfortune of being officially obliged 
to attend the administration of Torture. Next, that all the 


564 


APPENDIX. 


law-writers declared emphatically against it; and, finally, 
that in the case of Felton, the assassin of Buckingham, in 
the year 1628, the King declining to order Torture, as was 
usual, by .his prerogative—the judges declared unanimously, 
and with one accord :—That it was against the law; “for 
no such punishment is known or allowed by our laws,” 
and that it could not and should not, be attempted. 

To sum up, therefore, we find, first, that Torture was 
directly opposed to legal jurisdiction, and that any person 
acquainted with the law, or in anywise its guardian, was 
directly criminal in violating its behests, and could in 
nowise stand excused. 

That, on the other hand, the King maintained a power 
in conflict with the law, and that, contrary to Mr. Har¬ 
graves’ opinion, expressed in the State Trials, and in the 
words of Mr. Jardine, the instances of Torture which may 
be adduced from the Council Book, “ seem to show that it 
was a practice handed down and justified by a constant 
source of precedents, as an unquestionable prerogative 
of the crown, though directly opposed to the fundamental prin¬ 
ciples of reason and law , and condemned or denounced by the 
opinion of the wisest statesmen and lawyers, at the very 
time they were compelled to act on it.” 

From all which I deduce, first, that Bacon was not 
without justification in his use of the rack. That other 
lawyers before and during his day were associated by 
royal mandate in similar infamy. But that his case was 
in some respects exceptional, as we find him proposing its 
adoption in one cause, and in another actively superintend¬ 
ing its application, while the other judges, Coke among 
the number, were expressing strong opinions against the 
practice, and, in his lordship’s own words, were inclined 
to make “ for the cockboat ” to escape its scandal. 
Next, that in its adoption he voluntarily was guilty of 
what was then regarded as an exceptional act of cruelty, 
directly in opposition to the laws he was bound to main- 




APPENDIX. 


565 


tain and uphold. A cruelty which might be illustrated 
by some of the arbitrary licenses attempted by prison 
officials in the exercise of unrestrained authority, in our 
own time, but which on all hands must be held inex¬ 
cusable, if not indefensible. 

Next, that there were peculiarly flagitious features in 
each administration of the penalty, with which his name is 
associated, inasmuch, as while all ordinary applications 
of this ordeal were, on known criminals, or notorious 
malefactors, or persons singled out by religious intole¬ 
rance, his victims were men obnoxious on neither of these 
grounds. That they were racked in periods of compara¬ 
tive repose. That one at least of his victims was known 
to be an innocent man; and that, finally, the crimes were 
heightened by the circumstance that the person urging it 
knew that the act was illegal. That it was in contraven¬ 
tion of the law. And that the step was dictated by no 
plea of public policy, but by the basest motive of personal 
advantage. That it was not attempted under pressure or 
command, and defensible on the ground of duty, but that 
at least in one, if not in both cases, the act proceeded by 
direct inspiration from Francis Bacon, the philosopher. 

Thus, with certain justification, I leave the case very 
strong in proof (I would it were not so) of the great 
statesman’s criminality. 

( 

The modes of torture, according to Lingard,* derived 
from Tanner’s ‘ Societas Europsea/f were four. 

1. The Back. 

2. The Skevington’s Daughter (called the Scavenger’s 
Daughter). 

d. The Gauntlets, or Manacles. 

4, The Cell of Little Ease. 

1. The Back was a large open frame of oak, raised three 
* Vol. vi., p. 688. t Page IS. 

2 C 


566 


APPENDIX. 


feet from the ground. The prisoner was laid under it, on 
his hack, on the floor ; his wrists and ankles were attached 
by cords to two rollers at the end of the frame; these 
were moved by levers in opposite directions till the body 
rose to a level with the frame. Questions were then 
put, and if the answers did not prove satisfactory, the 
sufferer was then stretched more and more, till the bones 
started from their sockets. 

2. Skevington’s Daughter was a broad hoop of iron 
hinged together. The victim (bent double) was com¬ 
pressed within its circumference till the blood started 
from his nostrils. “ Sometimes, it was believed, from the 
hands and feet.” 

3. Gauntlets. These could be contracted at pleasure, 
by means of a screw. The victim, with his hands inserted 
in these and his wrists compressed, was suspended by 
them from a beam, with his feet from.the ground. 

4. Little Ease was a cell in which the prisoner could 
neither stand, walk, sit, nor lie in it at full length ; the 
victim remaining in this durance for several days. 


note on tiie story of the ring. ( Vide p. 236.) 

In deference to the modem mode of writing history, in i 
which novelty is the great aim and end, and of which the j 
ordinary recipe is simply to deny everything that has I 
been hitherto believed, the story that Essex confided a 1 
ring to Lady Nottingham after his trial, to be delivered * 
to the Queen as a pledge of his submission, is discredited. 

It matters little, but surely there is nothing inconsistent j 
with the Queen’s affection for her young kinsman that in 
happier days she should have confided to him a ring, and 
that lie in the hour of extremest need, unwilling to make 
a long statement of his faults or of his repentance, should 
attempt to make this old proof of affection do duty as a 
messenger for mercy. The story comes commended to us * 
on fair evidence. Its denial has neither philosophy nor | 
reason to support it. Simply novelty. It existed in report 
a very short time after the Queen’s death; it has been sub- 




APPENDIX. 


567 


stantiated by several independent witnesses, professing to 
have received their information from contemporary sources. 
If these witnesses, whose motives are not impeachable, 
aver truly, their informants could not have been in col¬ 
lusion. 

The first notice we have of the existence of the story 
was by an allusion by Lord Clarendon, “to a loose re¬ 
port,” existing probably before the year 1620; the next 
in a pamphlet entitled, ‘ The History of the most re¬ 
nowned Queen Elizabeth, and her great favourite, the 
Earl of Essex,’ in two parts. A Romance, printed pro¬ 
bably about the year 1650, in which the Queen is repre¬ 
sented as saying, “Keep this as a pledge of my kind¬ 
ness, which I conjure you to keep in the state it is 
in; and on that condition I promise you, never to deny 
you, anything you desire of me, when you show me this 
ring, though it cost me my life and my fortune.” This 
is, of course, as it professes to be, the mere language 
of romance; it is certain that the Queen did not employ 
the phraseology here set down; it is most probable that 
there were no conditions attached to its gift, but that 
simply a ring was given, which ring, returned by Essex, 
was detained in transitu by Lady Nottingham. 

To corroborate this view, we have the testimony of Lady 
Spelman, who derived her information from Sir Robert 
Cary, afterwards Earl of Monmouth; * and' that of De 
Maurier, derived from Sir Dudley Carleton, Ambassador 
at the Hague, through his father, a friend of Sir Dudley; 
but it is right to say that neither of these accounts were 
published for more than fifty years after Elizabeth’s 
death. De Maurier’s account is sufficiently circumstan¬ 
tial, and is to this effect. 

, “ Que la reine Elisabeth donna une bague au Comte 

d’Essex, dans la plus grand ardeur de sa passion, lui 
disant qu’il la gardat bien; et quoiqu’il put faire, en 
lui rendant ce depot, qu’elle lui pardonneroit.” 

It is, of course, possible that both these stories were 

* See ‘ Devereux Lives and Letters,’ vol. ii., p. 181. By the Hon. 
Walter Bourchier Devereux. Murray, 1853. Mr. Devereux says that the 
history of the ring is also related in a little book called * The Secret 
History of the renowned Queen Elizabeth,’ not being perhaps aware 
that this last-named pamphlet is merely a reprint, with alterations, of 
the work alluded to above. Sold by Bates, Sun and Bible, Giltspur- 
street. 




568 


APPENDIX. 


derived from one source, the narrative of the Komance, 
but it is most imjjrobable that they should have been ; 
the circumstance itself was not one likely to suggest 
itself to the romance writer, who was in his narrative 
merely reproducing, with imaginative additions, a well- 
known story of the day. While the difference in their 
asserted origin, as well as the qualifications of the actual 
narrator’s witnesses, both conspire to establish an inde¬ 
pendent testimony, and a separate and unimpeachable 
source for each declaration. 

On the other hand, the fervid and romantic nature of 
the attachment, Essex’s behaviour and language on his 
trial, the Queen’s excessive grief after his death, and 
her swift decline in health immediately after her inter¬ 
view with Lady Nottingham, the character of her lamen¬ 
tations on her death-bed, no less than the concurrent 
belief of her courtiers, all tend to show that such an 
incident was not impossible, though, as before indicated, 
the material circumstance is barely of sufficient importance 
to make the argument material. Enough reason, however, 
is shown to warrant those who are weak enough to prefer 
believing, what their ancestors believed, that they may 
allow their opinion to remain much the same as before, 
without any imputation of improper credulity. 




THE END. 


LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS. STAMFORD STREET, 




































































































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